[android] Can we locate a user via user's phone number in Android?

The answer is: you can't only through sms, i have tried that approach before.

You could fetch the base station IDs, but this won't help you a lot without the location of the base station itself and this informations are really hard to retrieve from the providers.

I have looked through the 3 apps you have listed in your question:

  1. The App uses WiFi and GPRS location service, quite the same approach as Google uses on the phone. phonesavvy maybe has a base station location database or uses a database retrieved e.g. from OpenStreetMap or some similar crowd-based project.
  2. The app analyzes just the number for country code and city code. No location there.
  3. Dito.