How accurate is CoreLocation's accuracy measurement

Question

I have been testing the accuracy of various aspects of CoreLocation and have been surprised to find the accuracy value supplied on new and old locations passed to the CLLocationMangerDelegate method: (void)locationManager:didUpdateToLocation:fromLocation is wildly inaccurate itself.

Walking certain stretches of pavement(along a stretch of road with buildings along one side) I have found that whilst CLLocationManager claims the CLLocations it is supplying have a horizontal accuracy of 5 meters, in actual fact the position shown by the MKUserAnnotation is anything up to 30 meters away from the position I know I'm in (often showing as being the opposite side of a row of buildings). This suggests that the accuracy reading itself is not accurate. CLLocationManager is telling me its coordinates are accurate to within 5 meters but are actually as many as 30 meters out.

To clarify, this is not a caching/timestamp issue It is repeatable in certain areas, and not something that improves over time.

Has anyone else encountered this issue?

Answer 1

CoreLocation is not a human and does not know where you "really" are, is the essence of the answer to your question. It is using the sensors on your device and giving you the best answer it's got, and the problems with its ability to know the accuracy of its claimed answer, reflect that the problem of location is inherently very difficult.

To digress into the location data itself: CoreLocation draws from cell tower triangulation, nearby SSIDs, and finally GPS, to determine the device's location. These do have varying degrees of accuracy, but what they have in common is that if you let the device work for longer, you'll get a more accurate answer. However, because all of the tools that CoreLocation uses are expensive in terms of battery life, it will stop as soon as it has generated an answer that meets your criteria for "good enough."

This is why another answer told you to set your desiredAccuracy to kCLLocationAccuracyBestForNavigation - when you do that, you're basically telling CoreLocation "show me the best you've got," and you've also volunteered for the CPU load, time, and battery drain that come with that. You've also gone off the normal scale that CoreLocation uses to figure out what's "good enough" - instead of telling it ahead of time when it can stop, you've basically said "I'll tell you when it's good enough."

CoreLocation will thus keep on trying to give you better answers until you tell it you're done, and you need to carry out your responsibility for deciding what that point is. This is also where you need to bear in mind that there are limits to how accurate the tools in CoreLocation's repertoire can be - you can get lots of significant digits of latitude and longitude, but by venturing off the scale, you've volunteered for the task of figuring out how trustworthy those numbers are. The pre-defined scales of accuracy are 10 meters, 100 meters, 1 km, and 3km. The fact that the creators of CoreLocation chose those cut-off points should tell you something about the difficulty of the problem - if better accuracy were easy, it would probably already be in the framework.

So circling back around: CoreLocation is reporting the accuracy of its answers faithfully, it's just that the data underlying those answer is problematic, and if it knew more about the accuracy of its accuracy claims, it would reflect that in its accuracy claims. Consider the hypothetical situation where CoreLocation knows exactly how accurate its accuracy claims are, then the situation where CoreLocation knows nothing about how accurate its accuracy claims are, and consider how you'd design an API to account for the problem. CoreLocation is as sure as it can reasonably be about how sure it is, and if you can figure out a tractable-within-the-limits-of-the-hardware way to be more sure about how sure you are, App Store wealth awaits you.

Answer 2

the hardware takes some time to get the accuracy. the best accuracy is 65m in 2-3 seconds. else u have 1414m accuracy