Thread by @CopperheadOS

By cloud-based assistance they mean their OS code downloads GPS almanacs. GNSS information is indeed available to carriers to improve location accuracy but they have a coarse location without that. It's part of 911 support and is likely required by law in many regions.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_… and probably other things require this. Qualcomm doesn't appear to harvest any information like this themselves, but don't know about Huawei, MediaTek, Samsung, etc.

Need Airplane mode to stop broadcasting location anyway so E911 etc. isn't that scary.

We document the GPS almanac downloads as one of the default connections:

copperhead.co/android/docs/u…

It can be disabled but then the GPS takes a ridiculously long time to lock on which is particularly important for us without a network-based location service like Apple and Google.

Apple / Google barely need the GPS in a city since they send off cell tower IDs / signal strengths and Wi-Fi SSIDs to their service which sends back location information. The fact that it works so well even just with cell towers also shows how well cell towers can track phones.

Lots of apps are built with the assumption that they can get a location lock super quickly which can end up being an accidental dependency on Google Play Services or another network-based location service (or a massive local database which we're considering shipping).

Qualcomm seems to talk about iZat deployment in terms of the number of devices downloading the AGPS data (GPS almanacs) since that's impressive but doubt many of those devices are actually opting into using their network-based location service.

Google's service asks the user to enable it so most people probably do enable it since they'd need to explicitly reject at least one request to turn it on. Qualcomm only seems to have convinced a few device vendors to include a toggle in Settings on some phones.