Location Based Services – What technology to use.

Vision Mobile has published an excellent overview on LBS technology. On mobiles API’s they write: ‚The key feature of the APIs provided by all the major platforms is that they insulate you from the underlying technology used to acquire location/direction information. As might be expected, given this is the core enabling technology for location based apps and services, the features offered across the main platforms are fairly uniform, as shown in the following table‘:

	iOS (7)	Android (4.x)	Windows Phone 8	HTML5
Location providers	GPS and GPS/Cell/WiFi	GPS and Cell/WiFi	GPS/Cell/WiFi	Platform specific, mainly GPS
Location (lat/long)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Altitude	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Direction of travel	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Direction facing	Yes	Yes, sensor API	Yes, sensor API	Yes, Orientation API
Geocoding/Reverse Geocoding	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Background tracking	Yes	Yes	Yes	Platform dependent

In the article on Developer Economics many more details for the use LBS Services can be found. A great read which you may find here:

Developer Economics zu LBS