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Connect as a Mock Location/ GPS Provider

smashed
9 months ago

There are times when I want to use my phone to navigate (or supplement the Garmin device navigation), but GPS service sucks the battery life out of most all phones.

Since I've already got $$$$ worth of Garmin GPS on my wrist and my handlebars, and those devices are (almost) constantly sharing location data to the Garmin Connect app on my phone… Why can't the Connect app be configured to be used as a “Mock Location” source? Then I could enjoy the features of navigating by phone *and* the battery life and/or activity recording of the $$$$ Garmin hardware.

  • 0 9 months ago

    The devices are not sharing the location data to the phone. If you log an activity the device will after you ended the activity send a file to the phone with your location data. 

    Why not just navigate with your Garmin device?

  • 0 9 months ago in reply to e7andy

    The devices are not sharing the location data to the phone.

    If the devices are not sharing real-time location data to the phone, that would be an easy fix.

    Why not just navigate with your Garmin device?

    Personal preference. If I'm not “doing sports”, there are often advantages to navigating with a phone, or even a tablet.

  • 0 9 months ago in reply to smashed
    smashed said:
    If the devices are not sharing real-time location data to the phone, that would be an easy fix.

    Easy fix? To add real-time location data sent from the watch to the phone and then make Garmin Connect act as a location provider for other apps on the phone? That sounds like a huge change in how it works today and would require major changes in the Garmin devices and Garmin Connect. 

    Send your idea to Garmin: https://garmin.com/ideas

  • 0 9 months ago in reply to e7andy

    If it were a huge change for the device to send location data to the phone… How do the group-ride features work?

    As for being a Mock Location provider, it's a fairly trivial coding task to enable that permission and share the data, and then the Android device sorts out sharing that data with the “other apps on the phone”.

  • 0 9 months ago in reply to smashed
    smashed said:
    How do the group-ride features work?

    Cellular data is used so data is sent to Garmin servers and then sent to the other participants in the groupride. My guess is that it works like LiveTrack and GroupTrack.

    Garmin Connect is not actively doing much. It is basically a viewer of the data on Garmin servers.

  • 0 9 months ago in reply to e7andy

    More to the point: Doesn't the group-ride functionality rely on GPS data from the device being sent to the Connect app?

  • 0 9 months ago in reply to smashed

    The position data is sent to Garmin servers. The Connect app is only keeping a connection with the device.

  • 0 9 months ago in reply to e7andy

    And the Connect app gets that real-time location data from…?

  • 0 9 months ago in reply to smashed

    It doesn't get it.

  • 0 9 months ago in reply to e7andy

    Then how does the Connect app share that real-time location data with the cloud?