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> the unintuitive part is that “location” means “Wi-Fi scan”

I was under the impression that this has been SOP for mobile device location forever: get rough location via WiFi and/or tower multilateration while GPS is...I don't know the proper terminology here, bootstrapping? That's why your dot tends to start somewhere nearby-ish and then quicky jump to your exact location.

It's possible that I'm way off base or my understanding is outdated, though.



> I don't know the proper terminology here, bootstrapping?

There is the term "Time to first fix" Maybe "getting first fix" could be derived from that.

Wikipedia lists a set of interesting situations with what the device is actually doing that causes the delay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_to_first_fix


I'm thinking that my devices could have an offline list of known WiFi mac-addresses from when it's checked GPS before and return those for very accurate results without scanning anything.




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