Defunct how? Have you tested it with say GPS Status? GoogleMaps certainly doesn’t force wifi reversion. It may well be chipset related, not a general conspiracy problem…
The S7 location service is defunct if you select “GPS only”. Android v6. I am not upgrading to v7 because it breaks some stuff. The S6 may not have this issue (from memory). My T705 tablet (android 4.4.2) definitely doesn’t have this issue.
The OP is looking at Ipads so I mentioned this in case it is a sign of things to come. The really curious thing is that even in an aircraft where there is obviously no wifi, the location is acquired immediately when wifi assistance is enabled, but without it it is never enabled 
It gets even more funny when the wifi is from the Sony camera which is moving with the plane 
That’s why I think some “data collection” is taking place. They want wifi enabled so they can report back. Of course this proposition is verifiable by packet monitoring on your wifi AP, for somebody who has time to waste… It will be encrypted (HTTPS) but it should still be obvious.
Do you mean updating the location settings from “high accuracy” to “device only” in the parameters tab will actually revert by on its own to high accuracy and wifi scanning?
FWIW I just tested it on my S6 – the wifi scanning / collection is still off where I left it, and after clearing GPS data I got a fix in less than five seconds with a DOP oscillating between 1.3 and 1.7.
Good enough to find the closest BurgerKing.
Peter wrote:
“<CRLF>yet another conspiracy theory<CRLF>” text
DOS line endings. Savages!
Recent devices tend to have combined GPS/GLONASS receivers (certainly the iPad 3 does GLONASS). The Apple stuff will get a fix pretty quickly in airplane mode, I’ve found. My iPad 3 will get a fix even inside an airliner most of the time which is much better than the Garmin handheld I used to use.
On my non-GPS iPads I use a Bad Elf plug-in GPS. I recently found by chance that I can put them on the floor of a high wing aircraft, in front of the seats, and Foreflight keeps working. I did this because I’ve been using my iPhone for primary navigation and airspace negotiation recently, with the iPad brought along only for use after arrival, and also ‘just in case’ along the way.
I don’t think any Ipad is any better than any other in the way the GPS performs. These consumer devices are all optimised for slow movement, with wifi assistance for the initial location. Some people find they work solid; others find they are less good. I find the Ipad2 loses fix readily in a TB20…
There is a disturbing trend in recent devices to basically disable the GPS unless wifi location assistance is enabled. My Samsung S7 does exactly that. There was a thread on it here recently. And if you configure it thus not only does it never get a GPS fix but also the wifi assistance switch gets re-enabled silently in various contexts. I cannot see any legitimate reason for doing this other than to facilitate covert harvesting of IP/MAC geo mapping; the device calls the Church of Samsung / Church of Apple many times a day anyway, and will use the opportunity to upload any data it has collected on the locations of wifi networks. Such databases are very valuable to the manufacturers. I can see a couple of people configuring their F1 key with a “<CRLF>yet another conspiracy theory<CRLF>” text
With IOS devices, AFAIK, an external SD card does not do anything other than enable copying of picture files to/from the “Camera Roll” paradigm. Apps cannot access it – unless it is rooted (jailbroken). Android supports an SD card (and many Android devices have an SD card socket) but with various restrictions. Apps can work around these but developers are mostly not interested in supporting this anyway, perhaps because an external SD card (well, the cheap sort) is much slower than internal FLASH which is why google discourages it (“poor user experience”). If you root an android phone then you can remap internal storage to the SD card in several ways including unix symlinks; I have two rooted devices but my main phone isn’t because you lose the Google Pay feature (yeah, there are ways around that, too). I used to have rooted IOS devices too but it created a lot of hassle and the value of rooting was much lower, and IIRC the current Jepp apps (except JeppTC on an Ipad) stop working on a rooted device.
I use an iPad mini 4 on a RAM mount, with SIM card. I also use that SIM card slot, because i get three SIM cards with my contract
JasonC wrote:
I get the cellular version for the GPS
Good hint, first one I bought was wifi only and I was surprised that the GPS receiver is inside the sim unit, so the wifi versions don’t have it.
I have a bit more space and use the 9.7 pro. I get the cellular version for the GPS but dont have a sim card in the unit. If I need data I tether to the iPhone.
