LocationManager.NETWORK_PROVIDER is not triggering onLocationChanged in ICS - networking

Question

Does anybody know what happened with event-listener for location changed for WI-FI provider. I saw a lot of questions about this but no proper answer.
I'm doing everything fine and it is working for older versions of android, but now I updated my SAMSUNG GALAXY TAB 10.1 to ICS and it is not working anymore. Maybe this is a SAMSUNG (or my mobile provider) bug when they implemented their UI into ICS...
I'm registering eventlistener like this (have in mind that it works good in prevous versions of android and I also enabled all location services in settings):
locationManager.requestLocationUpdates(LocationManager.NETWORK_PROVIDER, 0, 0, loclistener);
//refresh time and distance are to 0 so it should trigger location change event
After this request I checked if network provider is enabled and it shows like it is.
Code:
if (locationManager.isProviderEnabled(LocationManager.NETWORK_PROVIDER)) {
Toast.makeText(this, "NETWORK PROVIDER enabled!", Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
}
If someone has an idea please help me...

Answer 1

This is known issue:
After device reboot the network location provider works fine but after some time it stops updating.
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=57707
Unfortunately without solution yet.

Answer 2

To track how often the network provider is updating, I modified the onLocationChanged() method to the following:
public void onLocationChanged(Location location) {
dummyText.setText(location.toString() + "\n" + "Elapsed Time (ms): " + (lastTime - location.getTime()));
lastTime = location.getTime();
}
And added:
long lastTime = 0;
...as a global variable.
This will print out the time between updates in milliseconds (after the first fix - first fix will just print the negative time value from the first Location).
I ran the above code on my Samsung Galaxy S3, and the network provider updates around every 20 seconds, so the code seems fine.
I also ran this on a Samsung Dart (from T-mobile, but not activated) on WiFi, and the network provider updates around every 45 seconds.
I also ran this on a Samsung Nexus S 4G (from Sprint, but not activated) on WiFi, and the network provider at first didn't update at all. Restarting the device seemed to fix the problem, and now its updating roughly every 20 seconds.
Based on your comments and my experience, it looks like this issue varies between OEMs and even between device models of the same OEM. It might be another quirk of the lack of the strict enforcement of LocationListener behavior prior to Android Jelly Bean 4.1. Strict enforcement of LocationListener behavior only recently started in Android Jelly Bean 4.1, which is mentioned in the Android developer docs here in under the first requestLocationUpdates method signature:
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/location/LocationManager.html
Prior to Jellybean, the minTime parameter was only a hint, and some location provider implementations ignored it. From Jellybean and onwards it is mandatory for Android compatible devices to observe both the minTime and minDistance parameters.
Also, from my experience, the refresh interval of the NETWORK_PROVIDER location updates on devices that do update is pretty fixed at around 20-30 seconds across many different devices. So, the minTime parameter you pass into the locationManager.requestLocationUpdates() method is likely to be ignored.
Having to reboot the device to get a network provider location is likely due to not getting a response from the Google server that provides this location info. Not sure why rebooting fixes it.

Answer 3

I had the same problem with the NETWORK_PROVIDER. The reason is that when you request for updates, the NETWORK_PROVIDER does not create a callback for the method onLocationChanged(). You also need to call getLastKnownLocation(NETWORK_PROVIDER) in order for it to start updating the location.
The weird thing is that for the GPS_PROVIDER this is not neccessary.
I hope this helps.

Answer 4

Ok. So now I got it working. It is really strange. I restarted all my devices and now it updates. I don't know what happened and I would really like to know what is the reason for this strange behavior. Thank you #barbeau for all your time and help.