Battery Saving: mode to scan only when outside of coverage area

[garvankeeley]

• start/stop scan automatically based on whether the current location is within a previously covered area
• basically, auto-geofence, so that scanning only takes place in uncovered regions.
• we would need to look at the higher zoom level coverage tiles on disk, and determine if the GPS location is within the transparent region of the tile or not.

[AdamHauner]

I see it as really good idea in the context of wifi collecting and battery life, but I'm not sure, if it's perfect for cells collection. I will add my 2 cents: My phone collects cells of my operator only, not all available cells on location (correct me if I'm wrong). Also cells and wifis are changing over long time.

"Blue cloud" of coverage is not operator-wise and doesn't contain information when was last scan performed (yesterday or previous year is huge difference), so with false presumption of "already collected" we would not get rest of cells or actual data. Some of these problems could be smaller with userbase large enough with different settings, but for example in my region (Pilsen Region, Czech Rep.) we are only two regular collectors in this moment.

[Djfe]

Not a good idea IMO The coverage layer is too inaccurate for privacy reasons and it doesn't show whether the region has only cells and which type of cells/wifis And an old phone might only discover 2,4ghz wifi and gsm/umts cells but no LTE, while a new one does that.

Delivering such information would need a new server API. But that would cause unnecessary traffic.

And this technique destroys the concept that old data gets updated when the phone is back again. Wifis and cells don't stay at places forever, they get replaced.

I'm against packing this into the Stumbler.

There are better, more general techniques for saving power (that are not this complicated and fail-proof) like slower scanning intervals and disabling scanning while the device is not moving.