Hi,
I've been using GrapheneOS for a couple months now on my Pixel 9, and am loving it. However, in the last week I've had significantly higher idle battery drain than I had previously, and after looking through the release notes, I believe it might be related to the change made to FusedLocationProvider. GPS now seems to be used for every location request, which is a major battery hog. I have network location turned on as I am regularly indoors and use apps such as Home Assistant and the Pebble watch companion app which need background location access to function correctly. This means that I often do not have GPS reception, and the phone attempting to obtain a lock 24/7 isn't efficient. Looking at my battery logs, GPS consumes as much as 60% of battery while the phone is otherwise idle, which gives me only about a day of battery life vs. the 2 days I was getting before. I never even saw the GPS entry in my battery logs before my phone updated, which makes sense given my predominantly-indoors use case.
The release notes say the change was made as "...many GrapheneOS users don't enable network location and network location may not always be accessible..." but what about those of us that do? In this state, one of the main benefits of network location (reduced battery drain) is removed, and generally makes the phone less suitable for users that need/want background location.
Would it be possible to expose an option in Location settings to prefer network location before attempting to use GPS? I understand that a lot of GrapheneOS users (understandably) prefer not using network location at all and so would never notice this change, but it would be a pretty big quality of life improvement for users like me.
Thanks, and I'm happy to provide more information if required.