New GMS Location rerouting

starglider

Am I understanding correctly that the following no longer applies: "Our location rerouting feature reimplementing the Google Play location service using the OS location service does not apply to Google Play services itself, so Google Play services won't use the OS network location service. You can use the instructions above for enabling network location via Google Play if you want this. You could continue using rerouting for other apps or disable it to avoid needing 2 separate network location services enabled."

Witt the latest release, it seems like GMS location is also now rerouted. So, I think:

1) There's now no longer two location services running if GMS is provided with location permissions. If the "reroute" toggle is on, GMS is provided location by the OS like with any other app. So this is a big efficiency gain for users who want/need GMS to have location permissions, because only one location service is actually running.

2) If we want to use location sharing in Google Maps (e.g. to share our location with a friend), we should give GMS background location permissions.

Is there any other scenario in which giving GMS location permissions is useful?

Am I thinking about this correctly?

soupslurpr

starglider Yes, you're right on the spot. The only other scenario I can think of in which giving Google Play services location permissions is useful is if you want to use their network location instead of the GrapheneOS one. There's usually no reason to do this if Apple's data is competitive with Google's since our algorithm is more accurate.

user3

So just to check -- if I want to share my location with Google Maps I still need to give GMS location permission right? Even if I want to use GOS' location services.

GrapheneOS

user3 Yes, because they implement the location sharing in Play services. The new extended location rerouting feature means the location requests from Play services to itself for features like this get rerouted to the OS location service. This enables using GrapheneOS network location for Google Play location sharing and similar features inside of Play services. It avoids the need to turn on the Google Play network location service to have network location with their own services such as location sharing.

The reason we implemented it was to avoid crashes for these services when the Location permission is denied since our rerouting implementation has better error handling. Being able to use GrapheneOS network location for Google Play location sharing, etc. was not why the change was implemented but rather a positive side effect which is now an intentional feature.