Among the special things about mobile applications is location awareness. It’s an element of presence technology that provides details about a device’s geographical location to another user or application. Mobile users carry their devices along with them everywhere, so incorporating location awareness to your app gives users much more contextual experience. The location APIs accessible in Google Play services support adding location awareness to your app with auto location tracking, geo-fencing, and activity recognition.
A device’s location is often identified by one of the few ways: by GPS satellite tracking, by cellular tower triangulation, or perhaps by the device’s media access control (MAC) address on a Wireless network. In the age of information world and social web, users are not just creating content of World-wide-web but likewise geographically localize it.
Location-Based Apps can provide users the ways to access value-adding information shared by other users of the app in the geographical neighborhood, for instance, suggestions for restaurants or even certain items from a menu of a restaurant, public event and so on. Location Based Social Sites (e .g. Facebook Places) and Location Referring Services (e .g. Google Place, Yelp, Yahoo Local) usually provide this type of functionality. There are various applications that are making use of location-based supported reality technologies.
Location- Based Social Media
On the social networking front, a lot of developers are gearing up to enable you to keep track of your online community in real and digital space. Social networks including MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter improved the way people communicate and maintain interactions with peers, co-workers, associates or even a family.
New social networking sites including BrightKite are cropping up designed purposely as location-based networks that allow you to track your friends and make new friends within your neighborhood.
The advancement and ubiquity of location-aware mobile applications gave social media opportunity to integrate location with content created users.
The networks are based on various designs. What the majority of the networks provide is ‘checking-in’ – the act of sharing one’s location (checked by positioning system) with the online community, public, or perhaps people with access to location broadcasted by their friends.
Navigation
Navigation apps allow finding the actual geographical position of a mobile device by using a positioning system to get direction and/or navigate a user to required location. A unit of LBS navigation is mobile application Google Maps, which is accessible via many mobile devices (Android, iPhone, Palm, Symbian S60, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile).
As reported by a research in 2011, 74 .6% of adult Smartphone users operating on the Android OS in U.S. have utilized Google Maps during last thirty days. From the outcome produced in a different report, one can realize that 55% of adult Smartphone users in the US make use of their devices to “get location-based instructions and recommendations”. Navigation relates not only to automobiles or crafts but indeed most of the smartphones users use this location aware app for pedestrian path-finding.
Sports
The potential of Location aware applications and modern mobile devices can also be utilized to monitor sports activities. Location-based applications such as Run Keeper, Nokia Sports Tracker, Nike + and Endomondo has millions of users. Features of these applications enable a user to obtain his/her workout data, including location, speed, distance, or even burned calories and store them on the server. Endomondo permits to visualized real-time route of an outdoor game via Smartphone by using Google Maps and sharing that data with social sites. Another application named Zombie Run is adding jogging with a territory defense location- based game.
Tracking
Real-time tracking is among the most the best applications of Location-based services. It may be used for people tracking: young children, patients with dementia, companies to track their employees.
Vehicle tracking is also a great application of Location aware services. This may involve one vehicle tracking (e .g. car security systems) and the control and coordination of overall fleets of vehicles. UPS, a shipping firm that is considered to be one of the World’s largest shipping companies makes use of location-based systems for management and logistics hundreds of tracks. With fleet over 60 000 vehicles, one single track daily indicates millions of dollars savings.
Utilizing the same platform provided in the emergency applications of Location aware apps, the city of Portland provides to citizens’ real-time buses tracking. With Android or iPhone Android devices app, ‘PDX Bus’ users will be able to view on a Smartphone precise location of the bus to be certain about the schedule.