Android - Network Date/Time

Question

I\'m in the process of writing an app for Android. I need to allow my users to capture their current location & log the date/time that this happened. The catch is that t

Answer 1

GPS or Network timestamp can be retrieved by using the LocationListener in the Android Location API.

See the open-source GPSTest project for a fully working example: https://github.com/barbeau/gpstest

You can request to listen to either Network location updates:

lm.requestLocationUpdates(LocationManager.NETWORK_PROVIDER, 0, 0, this);

or GPS location updates:

lm.requestLocationUpdates(LocationManager.GPS_PROVIDER, 0, 0, this);

Then, when a location is passed into the LocationListener.onLocationChanged method, you can read the timestamp from that location:

@Override
public void onLocationChanged(Location location) {
    Log.i("Timestamp", "New timestamp: " + location.getTime());
}

Another option is to make a request to a Network Time Protocol (NTP) server, which is completely independent of the device and cell network.

See this post for details on implementing an NTP client:

use of ntp service