[OpenLayers-Users] Enabling geolocation on various mobile devices?

[Jeff Dege]

By "not working" I mean that I click on the "Locate me" button, on the Openlayers example page, and nothing happens.

Turns out that the problem on that particular phone was that Safari in IOS has some oddities, when it comes to enabling and disabling and re-enabling location services:

                http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10422322/location-services-in-mobile-safari-dont-allow-is-saved-forever-even-with-re

So we've identified the problem, on that mobile. But there are at least dozens, and possibly hundreds, of combinations of platform and OS and browser for which  the user would have to figure out how to turn on geolocation, for site with a geolocate-enabled OpenLayers map to be useful. And I was wondering if there was a resource available, anywhere online, to which we could refer our users?

Telling our users to google StackOverflow is not an option.


From: Richard Greenwood [mailto:richard.greenwood at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 31, 2013 1:34 PM
To: Jeff Dege
Cc: openlayers-users at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [OpenLayers-Users] Enabling geolocation on various mobile devices?

What do you mean by "not working"? Is the location wrong or are you getting an error or something else? If the location is wrong I would start be turning WiFi off. This encourages the device to use its GPS, which for me (in a rural area), usually give better results. Urban areas it might be the opposite. Another device-specific problem that I see on my Android phone is that it will cache the location which might be quite out of date. There is an option to set the maximum acceptable age but it seems to be ignored by my phone. However putting it in 'track' mode seems to be a work around - the first point may be an old cached location but subsequent ones will be correct.
Rich

On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 10:33 AM, Jeff Dege <jeff.dege at korterra.com<mailto:jeff.dege at korterra.com>> wrote:
We've added maps with geolocation services to a couple of our mobile websites. Everything looked fine, running on the developer's desktops, using Chrome's manual geolocation plugin. Now we're trying it on a number of different mobile devices, and we're seeing it not work, on some.

So to eliminate the possibility of coding errors, we've been trying to access the openlayers geolocation example, from the various devices:

                http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/geolocation.html

And on some, it works, and on some, it doesn't. The map always shows, but the "Locate me!" button works on some devices, and not no others.

Oddly enough, we have two identical IPhones, and on one it works and on the other it doesn't.

Clearly, this is an issue of client-side configuration, of some sort.
So, the question. How do we tell the end users to enable geolocation, on each and every device that any one of them might decide to use?

There are multiple possible platforms, multiple versions of Android, of IOS, QNX, etc., and some offer multiple browsers. (I have three different browsers running on my Nook.)

And our users, as could be expected, are idiots.  Or, at least, far less interested in the learning the nuts and bolts of configuring their mobile platforms than the folks around the office. And the folks around the office don't seem to know how to manage it.

So, has anyone assembled a collection of instructions we could refer them to?

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Richard Greenwood
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