Re:Google is defragging Android
by rst on Monday September 02, 2013 @08:41PM
(#6318065)
They're also migrating some functionality from core Android into Play Services. For example, the replacement for the (effectively broken) proximity alerts is the new geofencing API. But that's not in core Android, it's in Play Services, even though it's all on-device functionality, that doesn't need to interact with any Google central machinery.
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That's inaccurate. Location services doesn't just use GPS - it depends on data from Google when determining location via wifi, which is more battery efficient. So there are definitely Google-specific elements in there.
Proximity Alerts are part of the released AOSP core source. The replacement is not. They can interact with the WIFI location provider, but don't have to, and are still functional even if it's disabled (which is easy to do from the stock UI). So, this is a function which has been moved from core AOSP to Play Services.
Re:Google is defragging Android
by king_jester on Tuesday September 03, 2013 @08:31AM
(#6320493)
Outside of APIs to interact with GPS and sensor data, the location APIs in the Android framework have always operated with Google APIs for determining things like locations, addresses, etc. This is really nothing new and devs are free to write their own geofencing API.