On-demand location timeouts

15th September

We have pushed several fixes and improvements to our 1.16.x release. The overall location experience should be considerably better.

Original announcement

We are aware of an issue with the new on-demand location feature that may result in a timeout error when requesting location on some devices.

Our developmental benchmarking was undertaken against a selection of mainstream devices in reasonably ideal conditions when recording time to report location, and this drove our maximum wait times for responses from devices in the field.

While we do have to timeout the request at some point, our current implementation is a little too agressive, and may prematurely timeout while the device(s) still attempt to report location.

We're working on an improvement to this scenario that will be provided in a scheduled hotfix:

1. The timeout will be extended to up to 3 minutes, so for customers happy to wait for this, the loading screen will remain for that period of time until we show an error
2. We will improve the error we show to add more context to why location couldn't be captured

There are scenarios where it simply isn't possible to fetch device location; this may be due to the device being off, out of network reach, or suffering resource-pressure for low-spec devices. We do need to maintain a balance, so have to retain error states.