How can I get continuous location updates in Android like in Google Maps?

Question

I\'m building a friend tracking android app. While my friend activated the app and goes away along with his GPS and cellular data on, I need to track him on my device. That\

Answer 1

I believe rather than reinventing the wheel, you can use one of the third party libraries that are easy to implement and in this case, battery efficient. One of the library I found is SmartLocation. You can add the following dependency in your build.gradle (app) to start using the library.

compile 'io.nlopez.smartlocation:library:3.2.9'

After adding the dependency, you should rebuild the project to get the references.

As an example you can try the following code in your Activity.

Button start_btn=(Button)findViewById(R.id.start_location_streaming);

Context context = start_btn.getContext();

Handler handler = new Handler();

start_btn.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {
    @Override
    public void onClick(View v) {
        SmartLocation.with(context).location().start(locationListener);
    }
});

OnLocationUpdatedListener locationListener = new OnLocationUpdatedListener({
    @Override
    public void onLocationUpdated(Location location) {
        double lat = location.getLatitude();
        double lng = location.getLongitude();
        handler.postDelayed(locationRunnable,8000);
    }
});

Runnable locationRunnable = new Runnable({
    @Override
    public void run() {
        SmartLocation.with(context).location().start(locationListener);
    }
});

You can stop location tracking in onStop() method

@Override
public void onStop() {
    SmartLocation.with(context).location().stop();
    super.onStop();
}

SmartLocation library will give you more than what is expected, just try that once.

Note: Make sure your application does have ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION and ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION (both) to have accurate results. Don't forget to ask for permissions at runtime for Android 6.0 and above.