Jul 08

Place your bets: has Apple implemented the location-aware feature in iPhone OS 2.0 in such a way that the apps will work on the older iPhones? Perhaps this answer is already available but I just dug around and couldn’t find it. Ideally there’s a concept within the iPhone of location that’s independent of how the location is obtained so that whether your position is determined via GPS or cell tower triangulation, the apps don’t care. Anyone know the answer or care to bet on how this is implemented?

2 Responses to “Backwards compatibility of location-aware iPhone apps?”

  1. sean says:

    via a conversation with Tom Bradford just now (one of our employees who has played with the SDK) – it IS implemented in such a way where the location-aware apps will work with the old phones.

    One of the glaring problems we discussed though was the fact that the geo-lookup via IP address trumps the cell tower triangulation when you have acquired a wifi hotspot. Apple should reverse this priority and make the more accurate cell tower method trump the IP method and use wifi ONLY as a last resort when no cell signal exists. Seems like a pretty simple software-level change to make.

    very cool to know that the LBS will work on older versions- i’ve found the cell tower triangulation to be surprisingly accurate depending on how good coverage is.
    sean

  2. sandrar says:

    Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog. :) Cheers! Sandra. R.

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