topic Re: Current location position is not stable in Kotlin Maps SDK Questions

Current location position is not stable

NicoleLeiva — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 17:53:49 GMT

Hello!

We are using version 200.6.0 of the SDK and have noticed an issue where the location position pointer is unstable, constantly moving or jumping when the device remains in the same position. After debugging, we found that the accuracy is inconsistent at times. However, this issue does not occur while navigating.

Here, I've attached a video as a reference.

(view in My Videos)

Is this a known bug?
Is there a planned fix for future SDK versions?

To mitigate the problem, we had to implement a CustomLocationDataSource.

Re: Current location position is not stable

Shubham_Sharma — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 20:23:36 GMT

Could you help provide some more context to help us narrow down the cause of the issue:

You mentioned issue doesn't appear when navigating, what Autopanmode does this behavior show up?
From the video shared, it seems like the location display momentarily loses accuracy, then starts to pan to an "approximate" location and gains back location accuracy again in 1-2 seconds. Does the blue dot location position only jump around when the Location accuracy measurements are unreliable?
Is this issue reproducible in one device type or any device? Similarly, is the issue reproducible in previous ArcGIS Maps SDK versions?

Here are some tips to help improve the location updates received by the GPS sensor:

Option 1:

If it becomes clear that your device’s GNSS measurements are consistently inaccurate (>20m), you could consider a few approaches to help improve location stability: Set High-Accuracy Criteria, you can configure high-accuracy criteria by creating an instance of Criteria and then passing it to the requestLocationUpdates. This signals to Android that your app prefers the highest-accuracy sensors.

Option 2:

Enable “Force Full GNSS” (Developer Options) You can enable developer options to “Force full GNSS measurements” (no duty cycling) to ensure the device uses maximum power and tracks all satellite constellations/frequencies.

While testing accuracy logs, ensure Improve Location Accuracy is enabled: Link

Please feel free to reach out if you need any further assistance or want help verifying the behavior. I'm curious to know if using CustomLocationDataSource was helpful because of filtering out inaccurate location measurements, or if there was another solution that you found helpful!

Re: Current location position is not stable

imshivaprasad — Sun, 25 May 2025 18:11:56 GMT

This issue can be easily reproducible with setup of location display, attached the code as well, can be seen on device as well as emulator in android

https://developers.arcgis.com/kotlin/sample-code/show-device-location/

Re: Current location position is not stable

TrevorDraeseke — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 22:34:24 GMT

We've made a sample demonstrating some other location data sources available to Android users here: Show device location using fused location data source

A read through this blog could also help with getting location more stable in your app.

Re: Current location position is not stable

EirikH — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 07:19:58 GMT

Honestly, @TrevorDraeseke and @Shubham_Sharma , the default, built-in location display source should behave better than it does today. It should not be necessary to implement a custom source to just get something that behaves fairly well. As also seen in https://community.esri.com/t5/kotlin-maps-sdk-questions/locationdisplay-with-200-x-and-samsung-s24/m-p/1659534#M613 this is not the quality I would expect from the SDK so I hope some time will be spent to investigate this.

It should be quite easy to replicate using your demo app https://github.com/Esri/arcgis-maps-sdk-kotlin-samples/tree/main/samples/show-device-location