0

At the moment I'am working on a application that is using the location of a phone. Before I started with building my application I did some research about how the phone location is working.

The conclusion is that a mobile phone can talk to a GNSS satellite and then determine the location of the device (in real life there is much more technology behind this, but I will leave that aside for the sake of simplicity). However, I noticed that when we talk about Geographic locations, many people talk about a GPS location. But why is it called a GPS location? Because during my research I also read that the latest phones are now equipped with a multi-GNSS system that allows them to talk to different GNSS systems and use all this data together to determine a location even more accurately. However, this means that not only the GPS data is used, but also data from GLONASS.

So why is it always called a GPS location? Or is my theory wrong?

I already did some research about this topic on the internet but I cant find any information about this topic.

Theproudwolf
  • 9
  • 3
  • 1
    There is no talking with satellites. Only their signals are received. It is a gps receiver chip. – blackapps Oct 25 '22 at 18:47
  • And it is called gps because it beeing a global positioning system. Doesnt matter who owns the satellites or which system used. – blackapps Oct 25 '22 at 18:49
  • But you are mistaken. Every body talks only about location. We have been indoctrinated to do so. Also if you program an app for Android that wants to know the position or location you will only encounter words like fine or course location and nothing about gps. It looks as if wifi location is the only thing that counts. Your ip tells Google where you are. – blackapps Oct 25 '22 at 18:57
  • Initially GPS was a generic term. The US had "Navstar GPS". But Galileo uses a very similar structure of messages, so most part (but the signal decoding part) works also for other constellation, but we used "GPS" as interface name. Not unlike we are using the icon "floppy disk" as "save as". – Giacomo Catenazzi Oct 26 '22 at 07:34

1 Answers1

1

Because the average person doesn't care about details. GPS was the first major positioning satellite system you could use to get location. So people called it the GPS location. When other systems came up, people kept using the old name because they were used to it, and because they weren't technical enough to care about the difference. THat's why you still tape TV shows when recording digitally, all acetompinophine is called "Asprin", the save button is still a floppy disk, and my mother still calls any video game system "playing Nintendo". If you're talking to professionals in the field where the different satellite systems matter, they'll use more specific terminology. Everyone else will still say "GPS".

Gabe Sechan
  • 90,003
  • 9
  • 87
  • 127