What's the most battery-efficient approach of using LocationClient to periodically get updates?

Question

I am thinking about having two separate alarms to gather a user\'s location data every hour, one that goes off every 59 minutes to \"connect\" the client and a second to act

Answer 1

See the "Receiving Location Updates" section on the Android developer docs for a detailed discussion of this topic with the new Fused LocationProvider:

http://developer.android.com/training/location/receive-location-updates.html

This gives you the option to register an Intent with a LocationListener to the Fused LocationProvider that is automatically triggered by the internal Google Services framework when it is considered "efficient" to do so. I would trust that this framework has a much greater potential to optimize power usage, since it has a lot more knowledge of what else is going on in the system vs. an app-registered Timer.

Here are your options for registering a listener with different power priority levels, which will result in different levels of battery drain, as listed in the above docs:

• PRIORITY_BALANCED_POWER_ACCURACY - Used with setPriority(int) to request "block" level accuracy. Block level accuracy is considered to be about 100 meter accuracy. Using a coarse accuracy such as this often consumes less power.
• PRIORITY_HIGH_ACCURACY - Used with setPriority(int) to request the most accurate locations available. This will return the finest location available (and the greatest potential for energy drain).
• PRIORITY_NO_POWER - Used with setPriority(int) to request the best accuracy possible with zero additional power consumption. No locations will be returned unless a different client has requested location updates in which case this request will act as a passive listener to those locations.

Answer 2

Do you actually need to track the user?

If it's just about UI, then use getLastKnownLocation(PASSIVE_PROVIDER) and you should get something semi-accurate assuming they used location services on their phone somewhere else.

If you need to actually triangulate the user, realize the different providers use different battery. Passive < Network < GPS.

The more you locate the user, the more battery with GPS taking the most battery and time.

Start the service by intent one a schedule, 1 hour or whatever, only one service necessary. Only live for a maximum of 1 minute (or less), listen on all Location providers. After the minute or accuracy is good enough, you save the result and shut down the service.