Indicator should give feedback when location-service is in use by apps

[Michał Sawicz]

The only information the location indicator icon conveys currently is whether location detection is enabled at all, when more data could be interesting. Especially acquiring a GPS lock is often interesting, as this greatly impacts the location accuracy.

Maybe the location icon should be dimmed when nothing is using it and blink when GPS lock is being acquired, bright when the lock is fine?

The current spec is @ https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Location

== Bug revision by charlesk 2016-01-24:

The Location spec has been revised in this regard. The new text reads:

> The indicator should appear in the status bar
> whenever an app has accessed your location in
> the past five minutes. It should list all apps
> that have accessed your location in the past
> five minutes, most recent first. Choosing any
> app should switch to that app, so that you may
> control whichever functions in that app are
> accessing location. “Location Settings…” should
> navigate to the “Location” screen of System
> Settings.

This bug is about the first part of that spec -- making the indicator visible when it's active -- and is (currently) blocked on location-service bug #1536774.

The recent apps list component of the spec is covered in sibling bug #1235300.

[Ricardo Salveti (rsalveti)]

The lack of such feature can easily mask issues under the location-service (as there is no really way to know when it's indeed consuming data from the hardware, which is something that consumes the battery quite a bit).

As a user I find this super annoying, specially when coming from an android phone (that always says when it's used).

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Renato Araujo Oliveira Filho (renatofilho)]

Would be nice to have this to know if the app is using the gps hardware or not. For example the camera app would the nice to know if the location is locked before take pictures, to make sure that the picture metadata will contains the gps information.

[Bartosz Kosiorek (gang65)]

Currently there is only one icon gps.svg. I would like to to propose two new icons: gps-disabled.svg, gps-enabled-no-signal.svg and maybe rename gps.svg to gps-enabled-connected.svg. What do you think about that idea ?

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

The attachment "gps-disabled.svg" seems to be a patch. If it isn't, please remove the "patch" flag from the attachment, remove the "patch" tag, and if you are a member of the ~ubuntu-reviewers, unsubscribe the team.

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[Charles Kerr (charlesk)]

Now that the location-service component of this is getting addressed in bug #1536774 I think we can make progress on this ticket and also on sibling bug #1235300.. Bartosz, do you think your proposed icons still make sense now that the GPS menuitem's been removed from the indicator (bug #1351299)?

[Bartosz Kosiorek (gang65)]

Hi Charles.
I think still this icon make sense to comply resolving bug:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/location-service/+bug/1536774

GPS Disabled: No icon displayed
GPS Enabled, GPS active: Display https://launchpadlibrarian.net/210299143/gps-enabled-connected.svg
GPS Enabled, GPS inactive: Display https://launchpadlibrarian.net/210299156/gps-enabled-not-connected.svg

[Matthieu James (tiheum)]

We'll replace GPS symbol used for the location indicator by a more meaningful icon that represent a pinned location. An update of the Suru icon theme will soon include 3 new icons:
* location-inactive: when the location service is disabled
* location-idle: when enabled but not in use
* location-active: when used

[Daniel Frost (danfro)]

With OTA 10.1 on my BQ E5 GPS did turn itself on every now and so on - without me turning locationservices on, that was still off. I could not find a pattern to it at the time. That was of course reducing battery lifetime.
On OTA 10.1 the GPS on/off button was still available under the battery settings, that's how I found out about it.
With OTA 11 this button has disappeared, so I do sometimes wonder if internally GPS is still turned on occasionally (and apps could be able to use location-services?) but now I do not have any way to find out.

So, yes with the indicator showing GPS usage that would solve that problem as well.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Daniel, you can find location settings under “Security & Privacy” > “Location”.

[Daniel Frost (danfro)]

Hi Matthew, I am aware of that.
But Location turned on/off and GPS turned on/off is not the same.
At least that is what I was experiencing and what I tried to describe.
Without me touching the location settings (turned off) GPS (visible under Battery) could be turned on (without me turning it on).

Because that happened to me I am not sure if internally the same ist still going on but now with the GPS button gone I can not find out.

I suppose it would do the job to make sure, that if location is turned off GPS definitly is turned of as well.

By the way there is no option for location services only based network triagulation but without GPS, right? I wonder if that would be usefull to get you a rough position for Here Maps but you would not have to turn on GPS wich would for instance reduce battery life.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package indicator-location - 13.10.0+16.10.20160613-0ubuntu1

---------------
indicator-location (13.10.0+16.10.20160613-0ubuntu1) yakkety; urgency=medium

  [ Marcus Tomlinson ]
  * Give indicator feedback when location-service is being used by
    apps/scopes (LP: #1407921)

 -- <email address hidden> (<email address hidden>) Mon, 13 Jun 2016 05:24:53 +0000