[feature] stop processing location when on wifi

[asksven]

by salleq @ xda

-When connecting to a WiFi, automatically update location (selectable? to force update even if the time interval isn't met?) and do not update location again until WiFi is disconnected

Since I'm not a coder, I cannot tell how much this would save battery, but from a logical viewpoint, if you are connected to the same WiFi for say, 10 hours, your location should not be updated before disconnecting since for that 10 hours your location hasn't changed.,

Edit:

Your idea about wifi is interesting. Even if I can tell if the behavior will impact even more positively on battery I'm ready to give it a try. In order to reach the best battery win I would have to turn off the location listener while on wifi once the last position has been sent but then would have the problem of now knowing when the phone leaves the wifi range. There are some tricky situations to consider here:

• wifi is turned off
• the phone goes to sleep and the wifi policy is set to turn wifi off when screen is off
• you travel but use a portable wifi hotspot ;-)

But anyway I take this up as a feature request and as I have another one related to wifi I may combine them into one iteration.

[salleq]

You have valid points on the tricky situations. But that is the reason this "wifi policy" should be made optional. Personally I always have WiFi on unless I know I'll be hours away from an access point - same goes for the sleep policy, WiFi most of the time uses less battery than 3G. For those people that prefer using "turn wifi off when screen is off" and/or having WiFi most of the time off, the option might not be useful.

So I wouldn't see these two first points as big obstacles.

Again, I'd have the location listener restart whenever WiFi is disconnected OR turned off. For the phone it's just an impossible task to know whether it's in range when WiFi is turned off.

About the third point - I assume the problem is when you are 1) using a portable hotspot, 2) travelling, and 3) want Latitude to update? Unless there was a way to select certain AP names to blacklist from this WiFi policy, having the option to disable the setting would seem best again.