Location Function: Update Frequency?

[neonwhite]

I have a basic timer running to collect GPS coordinates as close to real-time that I can possibly get from a field app that is going to be used at our farms. However, testing the Location function on my laptop indicates that it's only updating around every 90 seconds.

Is this a hardware limitation, or is it a limitation of Power Apps maybe? 90 seconds is much too long for my purposes, where I would need it to be closer to every 1 second. I realize this will generate a lot of temporary data, but we can deal with that with a background task.

Thank you! I've looked through all the GPS posts in this subforum but didn't find anything about this.

[BCLS776 · Accepted solution]

I've done investigations similar to yours on Power Apps' location capabilities and you are seeing a hardware limitation. Try publishing your test app to a mobile device that generates positions at 1Hz and Location() will pull in new positions at that rate too.

One tip when using this functionality, especially on a mobile device: don't accept the first ("cold") position returned from the device as particularly accurate. If the geolocation feature on the device hasn't been turned on recently, that first position can be a long way from truthful. I often trigger the Location() function in OnStart so that the device has a few seconds to filter and improve its position estimation before doing anything important with those coordinates.

Hope that helps,

Bryan

[neonwhite]

Thank you, I think you were correct because it seems to work okay on my phone.

Also, that is a great tip about triggering OnStart.