Android GPS: android.location.Location what significance do latitude/longitude fractional digits have?

Question

I'm using GPS on an android phone. In a small test app I get like up to 15 fractional digits (sorry, too lazy to count exactly) for the latitude and longitude. I know that GPS on a handheld device is not really accurate, so why are there so many fractional digits? I'm not having any code issue, just curious. ;-]

Answer 1

The GPS chip internally uses 7 digits after decimal point, when providing the result in the binary protocol, more digits make no sense. (Thats about 1 cm accuracy at aequator) For many applications 6 digits or for display even 5 digits are sufficient.

You also may want to look at GPS coordinates accuracy