Does GPS require Internet

Question

Is it necessary to turn both Internet and GPS on before I can read my current location country  city  locality etc  in my app  If they are  then any alternative way to get the location only from GPS  Since the internet availability is an issue

User · Accepted Answer

As others have said  you do not need internet for GPS     GPS is basically a satellite based positioning system that is designed to calculate geographic coordinates based on timing information received from multiple satellites in the GPS constellation   GPS has a relatively slow time to first fix  TTFF   and from a cold start  meaning without a last known position   it can take up to 15 minutes to download the data it needs from the satellites to calculate a position   A-GPS used by cellular networks shortens this time by using the cellular network to deliver the satellite data to the phone   But regardless of whether it is an A-GPS or GPS location  all that is derived is Geographic Coordinates  latitude longitude    It is impossible to obtain more from GPS only   To be able to return anything other than coordinates  such as an address   you need some mechanism to do Reverse Geocoding   Typically this is done by querying a server or a web service  like using Google Maps or Bing Maps  but there are others    Some of the services will allow you to cache data locally  but it would still require an internet connection for periods of time to download the map information in the surrounding area     While it requires a significant amount of effort  you can write your own tool to do the reverse geocoding  but you still need to be able to house the data somewhere as the amount of data required to do this is far more you can store on a phone  which means you still need an internet connection to do it   If you think of tools like Garmin GPS Navigation units  they do store the data locally  so it is possible  but you will need to optimize it for maximum storage and would probably need more than is generally available in a phone   Bottom line   The short answer to your question is  no you do not need an active internet connection to get coordinates  but unless you are building a specialized device or have unlimited storage  you will need an internet connection to turn those coordinates into anything else

User · Answer

GPS does not need any kind of internet or wireless connection  but there are technologies like A-GPS that use the mobile network to shorten the time to first fix  or the initial positioning or increase the precision in situations when there is a low satellite visibility    Android phones tend to use A-GPS  If there is no connectivity  they use pure GPS  They do not override the data network mode  If you deactivated it  the phone won t use any data connection  which is handy if you are abroad  and do not want to pay expensive data roaming

User · Answer

There are two issues    Getting the current coordinates  longitude  latitude  perhaps altitude  based on some external signals received by your device  and Deriving a human-readable position  address  from the coordinates    To get the coordinates you don t need the Internet  GPS is satellite-based  But to derive street city information from the coordinates  you d need either to implement the map and the corresponding algorithms yourself on the device  a lot of work   or to rely on proven services  e g  by Google  in which case you d need an Internet connection   As of recently  Google allows for caching the maps  which would at least allow you to show your current position on the map even without a data connection  provided  you had cached the map in advance  when you could access the Internet

User · Answer

In Android 4   Go to Setting- Location services-   Uncheck Google s location service  Check GPS satelites   For test you can use GPS Test Please test Outdoor  Offline maps are available on new version of Google map

User · Answer

I ve found out that GPS does not need Internet  BUT of course if you need to download maps  you will need a data connection or wifi   http   androidforums com samsung-fascinate 288871-gps-independent-3g-wi-fi html http   www droidforums net forum droid-applications 63145-does-google-navigation-gps-requires-3g-work html

[android] Does GPS require Internet?

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