Change Location Mode to High Accuracy Programmatically Android

Question

Is it possible to get the information on the location mode which the user has selected among the three modes under the location settings options i.e

1.Hight Accuracy

2.Battery Saving

3.GPS Only

I want to programmatically check if user has selected High Accuracy mode if not then enable it automatically. Is it possible ? Please advice.

Lomax

i was searching for something similar; to enable it, for developers, ...as close as it gets to automatically, found that it would be a part of the Google Play Services 7.0 – Ber

possible duplicate of Android: detect when GPS is turned on/off (or when no app is using it anymore) – Widespread

Answer 1

It is possible to get the device's current location mode since API level 19 (Kitkat):

public int getLocationMode(Context context) {
    return Settings.Secure.getInt(activityUnderTest.getContentResolver(), Settings.Secure.LOCATION_MODE);
}

These are the possible return values (see here):

0 = LOCATION_MODE_OFF  
1 = LOCATION_MODE_SENSORS_ONLY  
2 = LOCATION_MODE_BATTERY_SAVING  
3 = LOCATION_MODE_HIGH_ACCURACY

So you want something like

if(getLocationMode(context) == 3) {
    // do stuff
}

Unfortunately you can't set the location mode programmatically but you can send the user directly to the settings screen where he can do that:

startActivity(new Intent(Settings.ACTION_LOCATION_SOURCE_SETTINGS));

Commercialism

Are you sure you can't change the location mode programmatically? I am trying to do something similar and would like to automatically change them if I can. So if you're sure it's impossible, that would be nice to know. – Polyclinic

@TBear Yeah, pretty shure. I don't think that this kind of global setting should be allowed to be manipulated by an app. – Commercialism

LOCATION_MODE_... is now deprecated. – Napoleon

Answer 2

You can provide criteria in the LocationMamager.requestLocationUpdates. As criteria you can provide one of the following values to select the accuracy needed.

Constants
int ACCURACY_COARSE A constant indicating an approximate accuracy requirement
int ACCURACY_FINE   A constant indicating a finer location accuracy requirement
int ACCURACY_HIGH   a constant indicating a high accuracy requirement - may be used for horizontal, altitude, speed or bearing accuracy.
int ACCURACY_LOW    A constant indicating a low location accuracy requirement - may be used for horizontal, altitude, speed or bearing accuracy.
int ACCURACY_MEDIUM A constant indicating a medium accuracy requirement - currently used only for horizontal accuracy.

See http://developer.android.com/reference/android/location/LocationManager.html#requestLocationUpdates(long, float, android.location.Criteria, android.app.PendingIntent)

Ineptitude

providing criteria is deprecated in android API 31 – Fitzwater

Answer 3

Since API level 28, you should use LocationManager.isProviderEnabled() to find out if a specific provider is enabled or not.

Changing the setting programmatically from your app is unfortunately not possible.

Remote

It's not about is GPS on or not; It's about it's on but it is set to Battery saving mode, for example. – Winding