Location services unavailability handling
Design exploration about how we provide feedback about the operation of location services.
Current design
Our current experience for location handling is somewhat basic:
- We show an icon in the top bar if location services are in use, and you can turn them on and off in the settings
- If the time zone is automatically changed, a notification is shown
- You can see the current location in Maps or Weather, if you think to look there
There are also some pending Settings designs:
- Show the current location in Night Light - GNOME/gnome-control-center#339
- Warn if turning off location services will affect night light and/or automatic time zone - GNOME/gnome-control-center#67
- When turning night light or automatic time zone on, ask whether to enable location services too - GNOME/gnome-control-center!2025, GNOME/gnome-control-center#338
Some issues with this:
- There's no way to verify if the location is correct, either as it is used by system features or when you share it with apps.
- There little feedback about status: is location services operational? Is the location accurate?
- Various issues with low accuracy handling:
- Desktop machines will typically have low accuracy due to not having the kind of necessary hardware, yet we don't treat them any differently or other options to the default behaviour.
- There's no feedback if there are steps the user could take to improve accuracy (for example, if Wi-Fi is turned off).
- If you don't have access to location data and your location changes, it isn't clear what you should do. Turn off location services and manually configure time zone, night light, etc? Then you have to remember to change it all back again once you do have access to location data.
- Privacy options are somewhat limited:
- No way to use location services for system services but disallow for all apps.
- No way to restrict apps to approximate location data.
Relevant art
Windows 11
iOS
A very tentative design
Edited by Allan Day