Certain apps cannot acquire location

redfarmer123

Something happened in the past 2 weeks that made Google Camera app and the "GPX Viewer" app unable to get location data.

First I noticed that GPX Viewer does not show my location on the map. I tried clearing cache, storage and then reinstalling it, nothing helped. Since current version was released a couple of days ago, I thought the issue is probably on their side.

However, today I noticed that Google camera does not add the location tag to photos either. Tried to reinstall it, also reinstalled sandboxed google play services, still does not work.

I have another app on my phone called "GPSTest", it works fine, it can acquire location. While "GPSTest" runs, I can see the green dot on the top right corner of the screen. It is, however, not there when I run "GPX Viewer" which I guess is an indication of the problem.

It seems unlikely to me that 2 different apps got GPS issues at the same time.

Any hints?

thetraveller1

I was having issues with location on the map apps. What helped was rebooting the phone and re-toggling location permission and precise location toggle back and forth.

redfarmer123

It turned out the app acquired the location through Google Play Services. Since location permission was not granted to Play Services the app was not able to get it either.

treequell

redfarmer123 That's a global toggle in Settings > Apps > Sandboxed Google Play. If you enable rerouting application requests to the OS (the default), then you won't need to give Google Play Services the location permission.