Got this from How much accuracy does PRIORITY_BALANCED_POWER_ACCURACY give?
The HIGH_ACCURACY mode use all location providers, However, it prioritize the location providers and include GPS along with location providers. The location accuracy is approximately within 10 meters of range.
The BALANCED_POWER mode exclude GPS for its list of location providers, and use the other providers based including cell towers, wifi etc. In this case, the location accuracy is approximately 40 meters.
The NO_POWER do not use any location provider, instead it is a passive mode of getting location from other apps. The accuracy could be a mile or more. It is solely based on the locations that are fetch by other applications recently.
Is it true that PRIORITY_BALANCED_POWER_ACCURACY excludes that GPS provider altogether? I've always been under the assumption that it still uses the GPS provider but only when the network provider was not available. Any clarification would be appreciated.
In my experience, the PRIORITY_BALANCED_POWER_ACCURACY uses GPS only when accessing location updates from any other provider is not possible. When I was using my application, a scenarios when cell tower was lost and no wifi available, the phone started taking location updates from the GPS. As far as I remember, I did not open the maps application or any other GPS specific application on the phone.
After looking around a bit, it looks like PRIORITY_BALANCED_POWER_ACCURACY does indeed exclude GPS altogether.
Google Play Services for Android. Location client not update location if wifi disabled
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24090584/does-priority-balanced-power-accuracy-exclude-the-gps-provider