Graphene Geolocation and Fused Location Provider

n2gwtl

I am interested in installing Owntracks in home assistant for private family location sharing. A Github discussion states that the GMS version is better than the OSS version for obtaining location data. However, I do not want any Google services to have my location. My question: is the fused location provider used for location in the GMS version rerouted to GrapheneOS as mentioned here? Or are these two different things?

de0u

n2gwtl My understanding is that the choices on GrapheneOS at present are:

the built-in location service, which uses satellites only, or
Google's location service, which fuses satellite location with Google's proprietary databases of cellular towers and Wi-Fi SSIDs

I further believe that the GrapheneOS project hopes to work with beaconDB on an open-source/open-data/non-tracking fused location provider for GrapheneOS (and presumably other AOSP variants).

BeHappy

n2gwtl I don't know if you're using OwnTracks but a very good alternative is using "Places: OpenStreetMap Sensor" within Home assistant. A really good add-on where you don't have to use GMS and use OwnTracks. Just select OSM.

Murcielago

n2gwtl

GrapheneOS is just now releasing a nework location feature which offers an opt-in toggle for detecting location using nearby Wi-Fi networks, providing a more power-efficient and faster alternative to soley satellite-based location (GNSS) with release 2025022700 (they had to fix some issues - if I'm not mistaken the feature is hitting stable with release 2025030100) .

You can choose between Apple's services and a GrapheneOS service proxy.

GrapheneOS is also building its own database service which will also include cell towers and offer offline support in the future.

So you don't depend on Google Play's network location any more.

source and additional infos: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/20369-grapheneos-version-2025022700-released/78

n2gwtl

de0u thank you for the reply. So what does "By default, location requests are rerouted to a reimplementation of the Play geolocation service provided by GrapheneOS" refer to?

de0u

n2gwtl What does "By default, location requests are rerouted to a reimplementation of the Play geolocation service provided by GrapheneOS" refer to?

When software people talk about service, they often mean "something that is behind an API". Two implementations of a service may behave differently internally as long as they are arguably both doing the job.

The inherent job of a location service is to tell you where you are. One way to do that is relying on satellite signals. Another way to do that is relying on satellite signals plus a database of cellular-tower locations and Wi-Fi base-station locations.

The GrapheneOS "reimplementation" of Google's location service is not accessing Google's database or -- so far -- accessing any other similar database.

The sentence after the one you quoted is: "You can disable rerouting and use the standard Play services geolocation service instead if you want the Google network location service and related features". The Google implementation is faster, works better indoors, and also maps locations to street addresses, which the GrapheneOS implementation does not at present.

At present your options are using Google's implementation of the location service, which relies on Google's code and Google's database and may well result in Google tracking you, or relying on the satellite-only implementation.