Why does geolocation fail

I'm guessing the others don't use that path. All cordova can do is ask for it, if the webview process is unable to get it from the phone however that happens things will fail. I guess it gets straight to the source? In my case on the samsung S5 it still has the same problem finding location from the wifi.

This initiates an asynchronous request to detect the user's position, and queries the positioning hardware to get up-to-date information. When the position is determined, the defined callback function is executed.

You can optionally provide a second callback function to be executed if an error occurs. A third, optional, parameter is an options object where you can set the maximum age of the position returned, the time to wait for a request, and if you want high accuracy for the position. Note: By default, getCurrentPosition tries to answer as fast as possible with a low accuracy result. It is useful if you need a quick answer regardless of the accuracy.

The above example will cause the doSomething function to execute when the location is obtained. Because the specification leaves implementation up to the browser, the browser or underlying mobile OS service may choose to fall back to cell tower triangulation or IP lookup, or use a combination of cell triangulation and GPS. Many mobile OSes already do this for native applications as a part of their built-in location services. For a Web application developer, this is great news, because it means that with geolocation, you can build cross-platform mobile applications that can rely on location facilities native to a device, just as native-application developers do.

When adding geolocation support to your application, you need to consider what your approach will be for those users visiting your site with an unsupported browser. For users without geolocation support, there are two courses of action: gracefully degrade the application or polyfill support via an external library. For the first option, you can degrade your application by showing a form that lets users give you their location, which you then can use via a service call to determine the latitude and longitude of that user.

You can view both that scenario and the online code sample at msdn. At the time of this writing, there were three geolocation polyfills listed. I chose to use the one provided by Paul Irish bit.

If geolocation is supported, execution will continue to the locate function. If not, the Geolocation polyfill will be loaded and, when complete, execution will then continue to the locate function. When I run the sample with this logic in Internet Explorer 9, everything works as it should and the native geolocation functionality is called. When I do this and execute the page again, Modernizr will detect that geolocation is not supported and load my shim. Then, when the getCurrentPosition method in my shim is called, the code in Figure 4 will be executed.

Much of what the world is calling HTML5, or the Open Web Technologies, is a set of technologies geared toward making real application development possible on the Web. In this article, I covered the basics of the Geolocation spec. I showed how you can get started, how geolocation is implemented across desktop and mobile browsers, and how to polyfill geolocation support in older browsers.

For other cross-browser polyfills for geolocation, check out the complete list at bit. Finally, all of the demos for this article—which are available online—were built using WebMatrix, a free, lightweight Web development tool from Microsoft. Some browsers use IP addresses to detect a user's location. However, it may only provide a rough estimate of a user's location. The W3C approach is the easiest and most fully-supported so it should be prioritized over other geolocation methods.

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