[edraferi]

Navigation satellites are inherently geo limited. Can the Chinese system be used outside the Chinese mainland?

[wmf]

It depends on the orbit. AFAIK GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo have global coverage (my phone can see all of them in the US).

[jburgess777]

The Chinese system is BeiDou. If Wikipedia is to be believed, they will only achieve global coverage in 2020.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeiDou

[yumraj]

That is not my point. It can be Geo limited by the OS.

If !(in China) _disable_

Although even that will cause unnecessary headache for hardware and OS vendors and will/might still lead to new security issues and backdoors.

[tialaramex]

These headaches presumably are from the dizziness induced by introducing location checks inside the location determining code.

[nix23]

Problem is...you (the chip-maker) pay licenses to the satellite-owners, if your chip does not work outside china, no money. The Chinese 'GPS' is probably just for military or for the independence from other systems.

[yumraj]

Yes, but hardware vendors need to decide if they put the chip in all devices and reduce manufacturing/design/testing costs, or put the chip on a Geo specific model and incur higher mfg/design/testing costs.

It's always a tradeoff and the cost of the chip in itself is not the sole decision driver.