Elite Frontier

Much has been written about the secret, so called tracking information, that is stored by the iPhone. But actually the technical reason is not clearly written by the bloggers and pundits. Here is my explanation:

It’s simple: iPhone has a battery. Using GPS radio consumes the battery. Using Cell Tower locations and calculating approximate location consumes less battery, giving you more time to play MP3s or listen to iTunes or watch youTube; whatever.

Apple’s solution to saving the battery: cache as much cell tower location as possible, when the iPhone is used, so that when it comes time for an App to get location, it can triangulate the position without have to use up your battery by activating your GPS radio when it can just calculate via triangulation (if the App requests to force use the GPS radio, then the GPS radio is used).

If Apple limited the cache to only let’s say 3 days, but the end-user travels a lot to-from the same set of cities (let’s say NY and Jersey) , the end result is that the end-user would be using up more battery; she would be freshing the cache with data it already had 4 days earlier and you’d be using the GPS radio to request information that the cached info could have answered via triangulation easily.

Apple could sidestep this whole issue by: Letting the User choose to keep the cache for: 0 hours, 24 hours, 72 hours, 1 week, 1 month, 6 months, or 1 year. And let the User know that the shorter the cache purge rate, the more battery will be used since the iPhone would have to rely more on the GPS radio instead of the cache.

My opinion, Apple decided it was too technical an issue for the end-user to decide and just decided to go with saving battery life by keeping the cache as long as possible.