Android Question Sharing GPS information with other devices

[Garrett]

Hello all,

I've seen a few variants of this but looking for the simplest one, and not necessarily the "how to" but the concepts so I can go and learn/experiment with them.

I can explain the concept similar to a multi-player game where one player designates a GPS location that is then shared with the other players (each running the app on their own device), and all the location information is shared to each other on a regular basis (say 5 minutes).

Do I need to run some sort of server for this? I've imagined using a cloud SQL server and just updating location data and pulling it back, but perhaps there are easier / more lightweight ways? Each user would opt-in to a unique "session", and then their data is shared with other users of that session and they receive from others in the same session.

Would appreciate any insight/ideas into how this might work. I've got a fairly good handle now on the on-device handling of the GPS, so the main question is around sharing over the cellular connection.

Thanks in advance!

G

 

[udg]

An alternative approach could be based on MQTT. Each device subscribes to the same topic, then every 5 min publishes its GPS position to the topic and all the devices will receive that info. You could run your own MQTT broker server or use an existent service like cloudmqtt.

 

[Garrett]

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll look into it.