yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Fire Themes and Apps] AlwaysLucky:
Well, you bring up a good point. It would be possible to code it for iOS for location sharing only. And it sounds like even if it only had the sharing function, many people would use an iOS as the location sharing device. So I will explore that and see if I can code it in the near future. :good:

It will (most likely) never be possible to set the location manually in iOS (aka mock location). Android allows an app (with the given permission) to set a global mock location. This function was originally created for testing purposes, but they left it in for this kind of application. So iOS devices will never be able to be the receiver of the shared location. :(
[Fire Themes and Apps] aguedob:
Android tablets like Fire are quite cheap compared to iOS devices so, I'm sure that there are more people like me interested in just location sharing from iOS to your Android tool. I have some experience developing for iOS, so feel to contact me if you need help with iOS side.
[Fire Themes and Apps] Neffy27:
The link to your site doesn't load. Play store said it's incompatible.
[Fire Themes and Apps] AlwaysLucky:
The link seems to be working now for me. Right now its just a redirect to: https://www.androidfilehost.com/?w=files&flid=52823

Is anyone else having issues with the link?
[Fire Themes and Apps] Neffy27:
working now, thanks a lot!

Apk doesn't parse for me, downloaded three times.
[Fire Themes and Apps] AlwaysLucky:
This is a common issue with Android 4.x on 3rd party devices. Many different solutions can be found here. The GPS Tether APK is good to go.
[Fire Themes and Apps] rcrh:
Has anyone found an apk for Nokia Here? The playstore version won't load on the NexusFire AOSP ROM.

Since we can share a gps signal it would be nice to have an offline map app too.
[Fire Themes and Apps] fmc000:
I can't seem to be able to connect the fire with my oneplus one. I really don't understand how the two devices speak to each other, as no data connection is necessary and this is probably the reason why it doesn't work for me.

Can anyone help me, please?

Inviato dal mio KFFOWI utilizzando Tapatalk
[Fire Themes and Apps] AlwaysLucky:
To be more specific, no internet connection is required. To share the GPS signal from your OnePlus One to your Fire:

- Make sure the location is enabled on your OnePlus One and that it is set to "High Accuracy" or "Device Only".

- Install GPS Tether on both devices. Use the APK download if you are unable to download GPS Tether to your Fire from the Play Store.

- Enable the Location Sharing on your OnePlus One in the GPS Tether app.

- Enable your WiFi hotspot on your OnePlus One.

- Enable Location Receiving on your Fire tablet in the GPS Tether app.

- Connect your Fire tablet wifi to your OnePlus One's hotspot.

And it should connect almost immediately... and done! Lemme know if you need further assistance. :cowboy:

EDIT: It should prompt you to enable Mock Locations on your Fire tablet when enabling the GPS Tether receiver for the first time. GPS Tether will attempt to guide you in doing this and this has to be done first.
[Fire Themes and Apps] fmc000:
It works just perfectly now, thanks. I had missed the "Portable hotspot" part.

Inviato dal mio KFFOWI utilizzando Tapatalk
[Fire Themes and Apps] luk2009:
Great idea

I'm going to test the apk

Thanks

Enviado desde mi KFFOWI mediante Tapatalk
[Fire Themes and Apps] castillo92:
Thanks you very much!
[Fire Themes and Apps] gdroid666:
the app works( i think only tested it with maps) ,too bad google maps navigation does not

was not recalculating routes, but then i noticed it was not working on my android phone or my iphone either
[Fire Themes and Apps] AlwaysLucky:
It will not work with any iOS devices (ie iPad, iPhone, etc), sending or receiving. I've also had reports that certain apps like Pokemon Go will not use a shared GPS location.
[Fire Themes and Apps] julianporter5:
It works fine when Im using Maps for Kindle fire, it picks up the location from the phone without problem, however I'm running google maps with google play services and it does not pick up the location from the phone. I can see this because Im using Fake GPS Location Spoofer on the phone which allows me to move the location around on the phone. The position within Google Maps does not move. The position does move using the app Maps for Kindle Fire. I know the problem is with Google Play services because when I freeze it using Titanium backup it does pick up the position from the phone again. Any ideas?
[Fire Themes and Apps] AlwaysLucky:
You, sir, are awesome. I've had intermittent reports of it failing, but few have actually given me any kind of valuable debug or diagnostic information. Thanks so much! I have a few ideas why this is happening, and if you wouldn't mind trying a few things and getting back to me I would be greatly appreciative.

First let me run down why the Play Services actually matter here. When your location accuracy setting is set to "High Accuracy", the Play services takes over using something called it's "fused" location services. These services use an algorithm to determine which location is the most accurate/recent to provide to the apps on the phone. It chooses either the IP location lookup from your WiFi connection, the triangulation between cell towers, or GPS satellite lock data. If the GPS does not yet have a lock or the accuracy for it is lower than the other two, it will not use a GPS signal.

Try these things for me and I would be truly grateful to hear the results, and possibly code a solution into the app:

- Change the location setting (on the receiving device) in the Android settings to "Device Only" or something similar, so it forces Android to use only the gps data provided by GPS Tether.

- Disable or uninstall any other gps spoofers or location changers (just for testing). GPS Tether essentially spoofs the gps provider on the phone (but with real GPS data), but when one spoof is started, any others are overwritten. So just to rule out the other spoofers as a conflict, disable or remove them please.

Thanks again! I wish everyone did this instead of giving me 1 star right away :P
[Fire Themes and Apps] julianporter5:
Apologies if my answer to your first request is a bit long winded. Firstly I will give you some information on what tablet I am using and how it is configured:

My receiving device is a 5th generation Fire tablet running Fire OS 5.1.2. It has been rooted. I followed the procedure outlined in the following link to add the Google Play store.

http://xdaforums.com/amazon-fire/development/amazon-fire-5th-gen-supertool-root-t3272695

As I understand it, it is a minimal set of Google apps needed to support the Play store (a bit of a hack?).

When the Google bits are added you have a new app on the screen called Google Settings. This is in addition to the Fire OS Settings app.

There are location controls accessible via each of the settings apps, although they led to the same place.

If you run the Google Settings app and select Location, it takes you to the Location-Based Services menu. This menu allows you to control who can access the location information. It is the same menu you see if you use the main Settings app and select Wireless -> Location-Based services. In the main settings app there is a line of text under this selection saying 'Share your approximate location using WiFi with third party apps and websites' it indicates that it is just controlling access to the location information. Fire OS does not provide a menu allowing you to set the 'Location mode' as there is no GPS chip only Wifi. I don't know what data is being fed to Google Play Services in this 'hacked' configuration.

This is totally different to the phone where Google Settings -> Location takes you to a menu allowing the Location mode to be selected between High Accuracy, Battery Saving or Device only.

In summary I can't make any selection on the receiving device (tablet) as there is no control available.

Regarding your second request: It was only because I used the app 'Fake GPS location spoofer' on the phone that I could see that Google Play Services together with Google maps were not processing the data in a similar way to Fire OS with a compatible app. But I think only the minimal set of Google apps were added to provide access to the Play store which may not allow the correct processing of location data. So I can remove the location spoofer from the phone but then there would be no difference between the positions shown on each of the mapping apps. Could you tell me what you want me to look for after removing the location spoofing app from the phone?
[Fire Themes and Apps] DB126:
Good response. While the various Open GAaps packages all fully support Google Location Services the slimmed down version installed by RookJunky's SuperTool may not as noted by [MENTION=7271427]julianporter5[/MENTION]. There are not many data points regarding the interaction between FireOS v5.x and full blown Play Services; most go for a custom rom instead. The relationship between Amazon and Google frameworks with FireOS v4 was a rocky affair at best. Since most people only want the Play Store for access to apps (which works fine on FireOS v5) I don't perceive there has been much experimentation with more robust builds.
[Fire Themes and Apps] AlwaysLucky:
Very interesting indeed. Thanks for the leads, I will continue to try to pinpoint this issue.

You would simply re-test all of your testing after it is disabled/uninstalled. Disabling/uninstalling any other GPS spoofing apps is a way to rule out any other gps overriding apps as a cause.

I'm oversimplifying it here, but essentially Android has 3 basic 'providers': "network", "wifi", and "gps". These providers are registered to the Android OS and are supplied with location information respectively. When coding an Android app, Android APIs supply an easy way for coders to provide a test provider (aka mock provider) to the Android OS and manually supply any location values to it. The problem comes along when another app registers their test provider as "gps" after GPS Tether Receiving service is started. Some GPS spoofers will even continuously register their "gps" provider to the system, making it next to impossible for GPS Tether to work. (Because I focused on power efficiency for GPS Tether, it only registers the test gps provider to the system once.) I should note that Android 6.0+ fixes this issue by only allowing one app to register a test provider at a time in the developer settings menu.

Thanks again and I'll let you know if I make progress on it. I gotta revert my Fire back to the original Fire OS to do some testing :cowboy:
[Fire Themes and Apps] julianporter5:
I am assuming that you mean remove the spoofing app on the Fire tablet - note that I started with two different spoofing apps, one the phone and another on the tablet (they were only different because 'Fake GPS location spoofer' would not install on the tablet). The app 'Fake GPS' was installed on the tablet as a system app. I deleted it from the Fire tablet and re-started the tablet. With the phone tethered, but with GPS tether disabled, the Google maps app and 'Maps for Kindle Fire' both show the current location as does Google maps on the phone - all as expected. I enable share and receive on the GPS tether apps and as expected the current position is still shown on all apps on all devices. I now run 'Fake GPS location spoofer' on the phone and the position on Google maps on the phone moves to the fake position as expected. On the tablet the position on 'Maps for Kindle Fire' moves to the fake position. The position on Google maps on the tablet stays at the current location. I now Freeze (disable) Google play services on the Fire tablet using Titanium backup. I select Google Maps on the tablet, it restarts and now the fake position is shown.

The only difference between what i describe above and what I had described originally is that the app 'Fake GPS' had been removed from the Fire tablet. The results are still the same. Google play services causes a problem when mixed in with Fire OS.

It is necessary to keep the position spoofing app on the phone as I don't think it is possible to tether the devices and to separate the phone and the tablet sufficiently to see two separate positions. The problem is not at the phone end it is with the tablet.

Hope this helps.

Have you been testing using a custom ROM plus a consistent set of google apps? Can you confirm that in this configuration, there are no options to configure the location estimation process in the tablet because it would only ever expect to process Wifi data alone?
[Fire Themes and Apps] AlwaysLucky:
Yes. I should've been more clear. Disable/remove it from the receiving device (ie your Fire) if using GPS Tether on an Android OS less than v6.0. I do not believe any fault lies in the sharing device and service at this time.

That is okay. Location spoofing apps should work fine on the sharing device.

Perfect, that's the info I was looking for. Thanks for reporting back.

Any information helps, but detailed information that you have supplied helps greatly. Thanks from your cousin across the pond. :)

I have a few Fire tablets and have used a wide variety of Android OS versions and ROMs on them. GPS Tether has not failed on those ROMs yet. The one I use for navigation is currently running Nexus ROM, but there is a decent selection of ROMs here, in case you dont have that link yet. This particular ROM has OpenGApps nano built into it, but I usually use OpenGApps anyways.

Unfortunately I never considered that Fire OS would change with how the location is fed into the Android system. But it makes sense because the Fire tablet has no built-in GPS receiver, so why would they include code for it to be a provider? :silly: And I flashed custom ROMs to my Fire tablets in the first few minutes of receiving them in the mail, so I really have no in-depth experience in how the Fire OS operates. Addtionally, the Fire kernel blocks the ADB catlog, making it even more tedious to diagnose issues on it. I will be reverting my spare Fire tablet back to stock Fire OS to test it out and see if I can circumvent whatever is causing the issue.
[Fire Themes and Apps] julianporter5:
It is worth bearing in mind that adding just the bits of Google necessary to get the Google Play store working with Fire OS, is a hack. It's quite unreasonable to give an app a bad rating if you have hacked your own tablet. Having said this you do specifically mention the Fire tablet and anyone who wants to use it for something serious will have found a way of getting the Play store on it. With the Play store added you can't avoid running Google Play services and that causes problems. It is tempting to install a custom ROM but when I did this with an Fire HDX, I lost all the thumbnails in Amazon Prime video app. Im wary to cure one problem and generate another - maybe thats just software :D

There is a bit more information about my 'experiments' in this thread

http://xdaforums.com/amazon-fire/help/how-to-fake-location-t3419556/post68299046

In particular the browser does appear to get the desired location so Google maps could be accessed that way.

I'm interested to know what location settings you are offered, when using the custom ROM. On my phone the Mode can be set to High Accuracy, Battery Saving or Device only. Given that there is no GPS or Mobile data none of these choices (with references to mobile networks and GPS) seem appropriate. I guess the nearest option is Battery saving but then there is no mobile network data. Is the best setting of this made as part of the ROM 'customisation'?

Its also a bit of a surprise that you can use an app which seems to generate mock GPS signals and it works with a tablet which only has wifi data available. Certainly not obvious to me. That is the case with Fire OS using the 'Fake GPS' app.

I wondered about fooling the Wifi position estimation but it makes no difference using a tether or moving my router to another location (albeit only the Wifi was operational .. not the internet connection) but surely the information available with the broadcast SSID must be very limited. Why would you broadcast MAC address or IP address? Do you know how you spoof WiFi position estimation? Or is it all so difficult that its much easier to 'tell' the tablet that it does have a GPS and that Wifi data is unavailable (mode = device) . I guess in software terms that must be possible given the correct interface definition.

Surely fake locations must be detectable if the Wifi position and the GPS position are inconsistent. Hackers dream :D

Anyway off to play Pokemon Go and find the Gyms I can win ;)
[Fire Themes and Apps] AlwaysLucky:
It turns out the culprit may be a setting that Amazon has set in the SQLite database file located at:

'/data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db'

Root access is required to modify this file. I found a way to open the file as read-only without root, which I can use to code a check in the app that will notify the user that they will not be able to receive a location without modifying this database. I guess I never considered that anyone would use the Fire tablet on stock Fire OS. :silly: Whoops! At least I can notify them up-front so they don't give me 1-star ratings. :angel:

I was only able to test this on version 5.1.2 of Fire OS and it worked fine, so I would love it if you or anyone else could test this on any other versions of rooted Fire OS. Simply download a SQLite file editor that supports root access, navigate to that file and open it. In the 'secure' section, change 'mock_location' to '1'. Reboot the device and connect GPS Tether again.

So while this isn't really a solution, I'm glad I got to the bottom of it. Thanks again for the lead on this issue. I'd love to hear any results from anyone regarding this so it can be confirmed as the culprit.
[Fire Themes and Apps] DB126:
Nice work and a very reasonable solution.
[Fire Themes and Apps] AlwaysLucky:
Well, I spoke too soon! Changing the value in that settings.db file simply changes the "Allow Mock Location" setting in the Developer Settings menu; which can be done by anyone without root. :rolleyes: I can code a way for the app to either do this on it's own or guide the user on how to do it for the next version of GPS Tether. In the mean time, any user just has to goto Settings -> Device Options -> Serial Number. Tap on Serial Number 5 times to enable the Developer Options menu which should appear right below the Serial Number. In the Developer settings menu just enable the 'Allow mock locations' setting. If you connect your fire to an ADB, you can simply use the command: settings put secure mock_location 1

Let me know if this does not work for anyone.
[Fire Themes and Apps] julianporter5:
I'm trying to confirm your findings as I've got Fire OS 5.1.2 on my tablet. When I used aSQLiteManager to open the database I found that mock_location already has the value 1.

---------- Post added at 09:20 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:16 PM ----------

Oh I posted as you posted. When I conducted my original experiment Allow mock locations was set.

Now you have gone back to Fire OS + Google play, are you able to replicate my findings?
[Fire Themes and Apps] AlwaysLucky:
Unfortunately I was unable to replicate the issue. However I am a few days away from a new version with many many changes. Hopefully one of them will fix the issue on its own.
[Fire Themes and Apps] julianporter5:
If you post here when you have a new release I will test it out on my Fire
[Fire Themes and Apps] AlwaysLucky:
Open Beta Posted

I attached an open beta for anyone to try. If you do, please give me any feedback and report any errors. Be sure to check out the widgets and try them out! Thanks for helping!
[Fire Themes and Apps] AlwaysLucky:
Big update posted!

Big update posted to the Play Store. New features included Bluetooth functionality and NMEA sharing! Check it out!
[Fire Themes and Apps] DB126:
I tried this on a variety of KitKat and Lollipop devices and found the experience frustrating. First the good: The UI is deliciously simple and the app did work, typically on the first attempt (both BT and WiFi). From that point forward the experiences soured, primary due to Google's aggressive location caching and insistence on enabling WiFi radio/scanning even when using BT connections. Lack of accurate feedback from the GPS tether application on current status didn't help. Not much one can do about Google Location Services as this appears to be the backbone of the GPS Tether app. Don't want WiFi scanning? Too bad - no connection for you. Don't want to use Google's often inaccurate guesstimates of current location? FTW - no connection for you. To top it off even when I bowed to Google's demands it often overrode GPS coordinates with a triangled miscalculation of my estimated location which was 80M way from where the GPS on my mobile indicated (which was unnervingly accurate).

A few suggestions for the GPS Tether app:

- send/receive notifications vanished when restarting the app and did not reappear

- app really didn't know if a BT connection was active or not after the initial connection

- restarting app after device reboot showed send/receive active when it was not

I had hoped to use my cheap 5th gen Fire (running CM 12.1) as a large screen alternative to my mobile for in-car navigation. Not really a high-priority but would have been neat in certain situations. That said, keeping Google's full suite of location services active on both devices while in motion is both a battery killer and privacy invasion. I generally run with location services disabled, turning on only the services required when needed. Be amazed at the battery savings. GPS only mode works well for navigation and most modern mobile devices only enable the GPS chip/radio when needed.
[Fire Themes and Apps] AlwaysLucky:
I really appreciate the feedback! I am going to try to squash those annoying bugs, and I will add an option to exclusively use the GPS receiver, instead of Google's "fused" location services.
[Fire Themes and Apps] AlwaysLucky:
I just posted an update to try to address all those bugs. I'm sure it didn't fix everything, but it may have fixed a lot. I'd love it if you could give it a whirl and see if the experience is any less frustrating for you. I'm also still workin' on the exclusive GPS option so it is still using Google fused location services at this time. Thanks again for your feedback and testing. Much appreciated! :cowboy:
[Fire Themes and Apps] DB126:
Thanks - I'll try. Might be a few days before I can get to it (sorry!).
[Fire Themes and Apps] DB126:
I spent some time with the latest build but didn't have much success. Feedback from previous experience largely repeated itself except I was never able to mirror an accurate location on the receiving device as Google Location Services (fused location) always intervened and placed device 60-80M from actual location. Tried disabling intrusive Google services after send/receive started but to no avail. Also experienced the same app notification failures reported before and was only able to establish a stable 'tether' via Bluetooth.

I suspect the experience is highly device dependent. May work perfectly for some while others will have difficulty. I probably won't spend any more time with this as tablet based navigation is a 'nice to have' for me. Phone and stand-alone GPS receivers work fine in my region; just looking for a bigger screen as aging eyes don't like to focus on anything smaller than a 747. :)

Thanks for your efforts. Great idea that I hope will continue to evolve!