Yes I think it’s the camera app they messed up. I think it might be something to do with sending it to sleep in the background to save power.
OK I’ve done some testing today and these are the results.
On my phone you are able to lock apps open. You do this by going to the recent apps screen (by pressing the overview button - the square one), long-pressing on the app which brings up four options one of which is a padlock icon which locks the app open.
- With Google location accuracy turned on and the camera app locked the location accuracy is woeful in urban areas but reasonable in more rural areas. This makes sense as once you get away from WiFi networks the camera app will fall back to GPS
- With Google location accuracy turned off and the camera app locked the location accuracy is good in both rural and urban areas
- With Google location accuracy turned off, the camera app locked and a GPS tracker app recording the location accuracy is very good (for a phone) as might be expected.
I suspect the problem may be that the update to the camera app is either sending the app to sleep or closing it when not in use in an attempt to extend battery life. When the app is woken up, if Google location accuracy is turned off, it doesn’t establish a connection to the GPS or wake the GPS up quickly enough and that’s why no location data is recorded.
Locking the camera app open seems to solve this problem and having a GPS logger constantly pinging the GPS appears helps too.
Locking the camera app open seems to have little noticeable impact on battery level so it’s probably a no-brainer to do this and turn off Google location accuracy. The GPS logging app also seems to have minimal impact on battery level so it’s probably sensible to run this too as a fallback.
I really can’t see the point of Google location accuracy – which attempts to triangulate your position using Wi-Fi networks – as its accuracy is vastly inferior to the GPS module the phone already contains. It’s seems entirely superfluous, at least when taking images, so it’s probably best to just switch it off.
Hopefully this will help other phone users, particularly owners of Xiaomi phones.
My favourite is Easy GPS Logger because of its simplicity, but I don’t think it’s available any more. I’ve tried Gaia GPS on iOS and it seemed decent, I believe it’s available on Android as well.
Geosetter is the best in my experience.
You can find more recommendations on both subjects in this thread: Geotagging Photos