[ppod]

Slightly off-topic but a question I've been wanting to ask: as someone with a terrible sense of direction, the most important feature in a phone for me is the accuracy of the little arrow on the map that shows me which way I'm facing. I'm an android user, and it kind of shows a blue "cone of uncertainty" when it isn't sure which way its pointing, and occasionally asks either to move the phone in a figure of eight or to point at nearby building to calibrate.

What is the limiting factor here, technologically? Are iPhones better than android? Is it the hardware (accelerometer?!, compass?), the GPS signal, the software? It still, quite often, seems to get confused and show the cone in the wrong direction. It's so important to me that I would almost switch to iPhone if it definitely works better.

[jakey_bakey]

Glad you said this - I actually made the same observation in the original post!

I assumed maybe there was some kind of GPS limiting factor, but the CoreLocation orientation delegate perfectly returns your orientation, at least at my device's 120Hz frame rate.

I think Google Maps might just be bad.

[kderbyma]

I think it could be about hiding the level of accuracy. I remember sometime back learning that there are many cases where sounds are added back for comfort and the expected experience that customers are used to, so perhaps this is one of those cases where they have continued as a company to mask their true power and just like with everything they do, they cannot appear to be a monopoly so they need to fake the accuracy defects and all that while behind the scene they are actually tracking it all ..... who knows.

[evook]

As someone using both equally often, I am kind of certain Android passes through the raw sensor readings while iOS has some form of debounce delay and guesstimation implemented. Both are equally often off in their readings. But that's just based on usage experience, not a hard fact.

[serf]

>I'm an android user, and it kind of shows a blue "cone of uncertainty" when it isn't sure which way its pointing, and occasionally asks either to move the phone in a figure of eight or to point at nearby building to calibrate.

Apple products and animations generally have more smoothing and hysteresis; my presumption is that the accuracy is hidden from the user in an effort to make sure that the arrow doesn't fluctuate wildly, whereas the android UI is more likely to show artifacts from the 'noisy' GPS/IMU fusion and inherent magnetometer inaccuracies.

'Slow arrow' was one of the things that kind of drove me crazy in iOS back in the old days now with faster hardware I notice the 'twitchy' arrow more on other platforms.

tl;dr: Most modern hardware is pretty equal as far as being able to determine its' place in space and time with decent accuracy now , but not all navi software is equal in terms of dead reckoning accuracy and pose estimation given the current data and the user expectation of noise filtering while handling the phone.