Activity Recognition Api Not working in some devices

Question

Does the location access have any dependency on activity recognition process? In some devices i could get my activity recognition sample working only after turning on my location setting

Answer 1

This issue is fixed in latest update of Google Play services(4.3.23 (1069729-030)). All we need to do is replace library project "google-play-services_lib" with latest version(4.3.23 (1069729-030)). I noticed a delay of about 1 minute in AR updates if we toggle location settings, but it works.

Answer 2

The Activity Recognition is part of the Google Play Location API. See the docs here:

• Recognizing the User's Current Activity

You can see that this is part of the Location Services offered by Play. Internally there needs to be some way to determine the speed of movement of the device - and that requires location based calculations.

Below is an extract from the Class Overview paragraph of the ActivityRecognitionClient documentation:

It only makes use of low power sensors in order to keep the power usage to a minimum.

This suggests (as the OP pointed out) that the API relies on network location, and not GPS location.

---

So it would make sense from a security aspect.

If I, as a user, decide I don't want to let any apps see or use my location, then I would expect the Play API to obey that decision.

Anything else, and the security is lost.