Any replacement plan for Mozilla location service?

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7

Ahoy!

In fact Mozilla Location Service is not disabled. Mozilla requires a strong reason to request an API key to directly use their services. However, Mozilla Location Services data can still be used in “offline” mode and not by accessing directly the data and here how you can do it:

  1. Download the full cell data from https://location.services.mozilla.com/downloads
  2. Extract the CSV
  3. Use “mlsdbtool” from https://github.com/mer-hybris/geoclue-providers-mlsdb against the csv file.
    You can use it as:
    geoclue-mlsdb-tool -c <country> <CSV_Filename.csv>
    It will create 9 folders containing each of them a mlsdb.data file
  4. Upload the folders to /usr/share/geoclue-provider-mlsdb/
  5. Now you will have the location calculated based on the triangulation against the cell towers in your area while you have the data link off. You still need GSM connection so that the Cell ID could be acquired.

I haven’t tested yet the Yandex provider and I cannot tell you if Yandex data is more granular than the data Mozilla provides.

P.S. If you want to convert the “world data” for MLS, you could also alter the code of mlsdbtool and use the following limits in the code so that the whole data in the CSV will be converted:

BoundingBox world_bb;
world_bb.latShift = 0.0;
world_bb.lonShift = 0.0;
world_bb.lowerLeft.lat = -85.0;
world_bb.lowerLeft.lon = -180.0;
world_bb.upperRight.lat = 85.0;
world_bb.upperRight.lon = 180.0;
retn.insert(QLatin1String("World"), world_bb);

I hope it helps.

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