There are tens, if not hundreds of mock location provider apps available on Google Play and that feature has been supported on Android since Android 1.5 from 16 years ago. Just curious, why is this app, specifically, any different?
The android development world is new to me, but I failed to find a good location mocker when I needed one recently. I tried a few of the popular ones. They were either filled to the brim with spam or broken in different ways (un-scrollable UI, generating then immediately swallowing their own permission prompts, and/or broken travel simulation).
I would pay for an app that works properly, if only I could find one. Next time, I'll probably give this one a try.
You can use the android emulators. There you can define a fixed point or also a route which it will follow (and give you location updates). But maybe this project is interesting for real devices.
The problem with all of them is that Android lets apps check if location is being mocked via the mock location API.
A good mocking API should not let the things being mocked know that they are being mocked at.
You can modify a fork of Android to do this at the OS level, I suppose.
But I wonder if I could make a phone case that emits GPS signals that make my phone think it is in an arbitrary location but without interfering with anyone standing a reasonable distance away from me.
It's very very simple too. I made one that that just randomly changed the location within a specified area years ago. To learn the API. It didn't work very well. I wanted to grab the users actual location and offset it randomly. So a user could choose to degrade the accuracy of apps tracking their location.
But once you've set it as at THE mock app you can't get your actual location to offset (maybe this has changed since.)
despite my attempts to make sure it ran correctly in the background it would always stop working after a while. That was the hard part at the time , making anything run in the background without the phone killing the process or eating the battery.
