A box of really old TomToms (softball sized) appeared at a street market a year ago, two for a dollar. I doubt anyone was interested in any and I doubt the seller would bother to return with them. They were probably be wasted.
In principle, old TomToms could be used to feed a smartphone. If you use a smartphone for navigation, these components compete to suck the battery dry:
- the color LCD
- GPS radio receiver
- WiFi¹
- GSM¹
(1) only applies to Google boot-lickers who enable location tracking in order to avoid the wait to acquire satellites.
The GPS is a significant drain because it’s heavy on non-stop calculations, which generates heat (wasted energy), and the heat itself hits the battery even harder.
We can do better. TomToms with bluetooth tend to suppot NMEA (I think). So the old TomTom w/outdated maps could be used purely to get a fix using its own battery supply, which it then transmits over bluetooth. So you toss TT in your backpack. Disable the GPS on your smartphone and enable bluetooth. Bluetooth is like 1 tenth the energy consumption of GPS. Then you enable mock GPS in advanced settings and run a FOSS bluetooth app that serves as middleware to feed the mock location.
The problem: OSMand and Organic Maps are both incapable of using mock GPS locations. And even if they add the capability, it would only be in their recent version which has already left behind older phones. (edit: well Organic Maps is not that bad… their latest version supports AOS 5)
Refusing to support Google means using airplane mode with location svcs off and being wholly dependent on GPS. And for whatever reason it takes me around 20—30 min to get a fix despite being in a large major city; every time. This must make Google happy. The old TomToms were faster at getting a fix. IIRC, they would take 20—30″ only the first time but quickly got a fix after subsequent power cycles in the same area thereafter.
Smartphones have the sensors to do inertial nav if you calibrate a starting point. But the apps don’t have their shit together yet. I vaguely a recall a FOSS app doing inertial nav, but not too useful if it results in a mock location that OSMand cannot handle.
If you can root your phone you can install whatever location mocking app from fdroid, they should work in all apps, an some may even work on ancient android versions.
Network based location is available via other ways, not just by the goog, if you install microg or only its location part unifiednlp, you can get quick rough location from celltowers and even crowd sourced wifi based location, formerly collected by mozilla, nowadays by poziton.
Some links for further reading, if you not familiar with android rooting scene,you will have to read a lot:
Some location mocking apps, I used one some time ago, but I don’t remember which one:
Only certain phones. I tried several different hacks out in the wild for my version and they failed. It’s also an off-brand phone that gets no notice by any of the alternate OS projects so flashing is not an option either.
What exactly are you referring to? The stock AOS already supports mock locations. And I’ve used it. But not many apps are designed to make use of the mock location. I vaguely recall coming across an app that hacked the official GPS API to use the mock location in order to fool apps that are naive about mock locations, but of course that bit only works on rooted phones.
It’s a shit show all around. But in any case since not all phones are rootable, apps need to be written to specifically read the mock location feed as a GPS alternative.
I heard of
microgbefore; looked into it, and went no further. I don’t recall what the problem was, but I vaguely recall that it still requires some kind of ties to Google.(edit) MicroG is proposed as an alternative to playstore. I used to use Raccoon, a desktop app to fetch playstore junk. It still required a Google login to use Google’s API. The circumvention was to use a shared account. I imagine that’s also how microg must work. But I eventually decided Playstore garbage does not belong on my phone anyway. I will only use apps I can obtain outside of playstore.
If there is some way of getting that info using an unrooted phone that has been Google-neutered to the full unrooted extent, I would be interested. I could not remove most of the Google infra but I could disable it. I had it in my notes to check out Unified Network Location Provider and forgot about it. Thanks for the reminder.
My notes also mention this app, which only works on recent phones (not mine):
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.wigle.wigleandroid/
Not sure if that was the barrier that stopped me looking further.
In any case, there is still a role for old TomToms to play here. Using cell towers and wifi APs requires your navigation phone to have those radios powered on, which need energy.
If you can get a factory rom, usually you can root it with magisk if you can unlock the bootloader, you don’t necessarily need a custom rom, magisk can patch stock roms.
With rooted location mocking, apps can’t see you mock it, maybe pokemon go can, but I tested routing and navigation in organic maps this way.
Nanolx has a very detailed install instructions for microg with edge cases: https://gitlab.com/Nanolx/NanoDroid