deGoogle

The GPS receiver in Androids takes a long time to acquire satellites. I find that suspicious because back in the days of TomTom and Garmin, satellite acquisition was only slow on the first bootup or after being powered on far from home. But those dedicated satnavs seemed better at remembering satellite data. It seems like Android might be deliberately slow in order to incentivize users turning on “Google Location Services” (GLS). I also notice OSMand sometimes thinks I’m moving along a few meters away, sometimes on another parallel street. I did not see that degree of inaccuracy on TomTom or Garmin.

I will not agree to GLS because I will not feed Google. So how can I improve the speed of getting a fix and the accuracy?

I know there is an app that uses the phone’s other sensors to track position from an origin that you specify. It claims to not even need GPS. I still have to try that. But it might be useful if it would use GPS to periodically recalibrate.

Is there any free-world way to fetch a db of SSIDs and GSM towers in a city, and bypass GLS?

update

Thanks for the replies. Just now (14 days after my post) I happened to discover replies here when visiting the instance directly while logged out. That’s really screwy that I apparently need to be subscribed to the whole community to get notifcations of replies to my single post. Now that I’m logged in and viewing the slrpnk mirror, I can’t interact with the other comments.