I need to get the exact country location of the user without using location permissions.
I have tried using locale, but it can be changed manually by user.
let loc = Locale.current
print(loc.regionCode)
Right now i am getting location using locale, but it can be changed by the user manually. I need to check the exact country of the user.
There are web API services your app could contact to obtain the rough location of the ip address. It's not at all guaranteed to be the correct country of the device, as your user may be using an out-of-country VPN service, but it's probably the only thing you can do without asking the device for location.
Here's an example service. I know nothing about the quality of this service (I picked this one at random for this answer). There seem to be many out there, so do your homework as to which would be best for your users and yourself.
There's another approach you could take: simply ask the user, and have faith that most of them will answer honestly. If their answer doesn't make sense per the timezone of the device, maybe suspect their answer is false.
Related
I'm about to start expanding my secondhand app, where people can put their used university books for sale.
Right now the app is only available in one country, but in the near future other scandinavian countries will follow.
As an example I want to expand to Sweden, the user should only be able to see/buy/sell books that are for sale in that country.
I have come up with 2 solutions, but none of them are quite good:
Location decides country.
User selects the country from a list.
I would like to hear your thoughts on this, since lots of apps do this - but I can't figure out how.
Why not a combination of both? Try the location services first, if for whatever reason they have location services turned off or don't allow it, have them select their country. The country selection should be one of the first prompts they are given when they open the app (if location services aren't on). Otherwise, before they are allowed to post any books for sale. In other words they shouldn't be allowed to put a book up for sales without the app knowing which country they are in.
Are you using swift (what version) or objective-c?
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/CoreLocation/Reference/CLLocationManager_Class/
You'll need a list of countries: How do I get a list of countries in Swift ios?
If you are willing to pay some. You could look at a ip based Solution like the www.maxmind.com api. It Gives country info and more. And we bought 50.000 queries for 50 dollars. And as we check once per user, we did not even finísh our bought queries!
I believe your application should do a guesswork and provide easy-to-use alternative for the case when the guess was incorrect. Get the country by location or IP. When the user installs the app, show the selected country and make sure your user can easily change it both in the installer and in the app itself (if, for instance, one student moves from a country to the other).
So the original requirements was that on the launch of the app, the mobile app will get the current location of the user precise to City. Based on the city, the server/app client will give-city related content.
I know it would not be too difficult if I could use the core location service (since you know suspicious (self-concerned) users usually will disable the location service for a not-so-trusting app).
I have searched the web for few hours and get an summary of following solutions where I need your help to decide which one could be my best option or if you have any other better ones.
Using the [NSlocale autoupdatingCurrentLocale]
cons:
a.The explanation of the return value of the call from apple's document: "The locale is formed from the settings for the current user’s chosen system locale overlaid with any custom settings the user has specified in System Preferences." From which I don't understand what is "custom settings the user has specified in System Preferences"
reference link
b. This value could be misleading and not related with user's actual current city/country at all.
comments: I would be appreciated if anybody could explain me how the locale is changed according to user's setting.
Getting the current iPhone TimeZone
NSTimeZone *localTime = [NSTimeZone systemTimeZone];
NSLog(#"Current local timezone is %#",[localTime name]);
cons:
a. same as item b above, because user can always specify rather than let the system auto update the time zone.
b. precision is comprimised, only capital city will be listed.
comments:Not very promising but easy to implement
Using IP based location detection webservice
Based on my reading, the process will involve the app sending a request to a server where the server will record the IP of the request.(Don't think from App itself could get its own IP correctly since it may inside a local network) Based on the IP recorded through some third party service (with a IP db or some other available APIs), it will return the city information back to the client.
cons：
a. I've never implemented such thing, don't know if it is feasible for a mobile app.
b. Even if it is possible, don't know if it is faster than the core location service.
comments: If you know it is possible for a iOS app to do so please let me know.
Please kindly give me any thoughts you have or suggest any better solution if you know.
Thank you very much.
A preventive measure to avoid all your trouble would be to create an app that wouldn't appear 'not-so-trusting' and use core location to get the location. If a user still does not allow your app to know the location and knowing his city is a must, let him select a city from the list of cites for which content is available. Of course this opens up a huge hole allowing use to get the content for ANY city. Only you can decide if this is an acceptable tradeoff for simpler implementation.
If you must know the CITY automatically without core location, the first two options you mentioned, 'locale' and 'time zone' are useless as each of them encompasses large number of cities. Also, as you mentioned they're dependent on user's settings.
So reverse geocoding the IP address of a web service request using GeoIP or some such service is your best bet. You can find a lot of discussion and references for this on the web.
NSlocale can be highly inaccurate. My colleague bought the iPhone from New Zealand (he was studying there). When I am testing his phone to get the locale for language, it still show as New Zealand English.
Using IP is possible. I made a quick search and I found:-
Find IP address in iphone
how to get ip address of iphone programmatically
You might want to take a good read from above links.
I still think using Core Location is the best way to get the location of the user.
I started using Path, and noticed that in the registration process, they identified both my phone number and my email.
As far as I know, there is no way to programmatically get those values (without being rejected by apple), so how does path do it?
Moving my comments into an answer :)
As I've stated above, this is a duplicate of How does Square's CardCase app automatically populate the user's details from the address book?
Because Path asks beforehand for the first and last name it's easy to search for the contact in the address book. Of course one has to handle the case when a) no contact or b) multiple contacts are found. In both this cases I'd probably go with standard input fields, because for the "no contact found" case you need those anyway.
How common it is to have a contact with it's own name I don't know, but according to the Fact that Path and other apps are doing it the same way I suppose it's worth taking the risk :) AFAIK MacOS X automatically creates a contact with my name in the Address Book, but really can't recall if iOS has the same behavior.
in my asp.net mvc app i have a survey Model that can be created by anyone. Moreover, i want people from specific part of world to participate (vote) in the survey. It is easy job if i know the location (it could be city, country or state etc.). i want to add this location restriction at the time of survey creation (i.e user could tell that people of Islamabad or punjab or Pakistan) could vote or fill out this survey form. Moreover, i want to add that location restriction is applicable (or expected) for small number of surveys (5 percent at most) so how to most efficiently implement this functionality.
You could do this a couple of ways:
Determine where the user is from based on a previous question asking their location. Not bullet proof as the user could easily say they are from somewhere they are not.
Obtain an IP -> Country mapping list that will provide you a lookup of the customer's IP address vs. their location. You would restrict based on this.
You can figure out someone's location using IP address. There are many services out there that offer IP address location. They will give you an approximation of the users location based on that.
Here is an example of the service:
You can also get their location using HTML5 geolocation features.
For your case using IP address is probably good enough. The HTML5 option is nice because if the user doesn't have a GPS device on their system it eventually falls back to using IP address location.
In order to get a users IP address in ASP.NET you can use
Request.Servervariables("REMOTE_ADDR")
I need to keep track of the users lat/lng/city/country for my application with the following two requirements:
1) Get the users lat/lng/city/country automatically. (This is easy, I can use the ip or if they have a browser that supports geolocation, even better).
2) The user is allowed to customize this location (maybe the ip address lookup didn't give an accurate city). The location is a freeform text field (not a dropdown). When the user enters a new location it should be validated against available cities/countries. If it validates against any one of them, select it and then retrieve the latlng for the new location. (This is what I'm having trouble with)
Also to clarify, this is a Rails 3 app using MongoDB. I am looking for either a single API or database that would allow me to do both (1) and (2). Has anyone done anything similar? Looking for some ideas as to how others have done this.
Your question isn't entirely clear as to what problem you are having. In general terms, I would do it like this:
have a Location model that stores location name and coordinates
when the user enters a location, send an Ajax request to look it up
if it's found, set the location in the session
if it isn't found, return a list of similarly named locations (in case there was a typo) and let the user choose one or stick to their input
when they are done with the input, insert a new location if required and store User.location_id.
You could use Google's Geocoding API to look up the coordinates of unknown locations.
I would recommend the Geokit Gem, it does a very nice job of providing a front end for several Geocoding APIs. I highly recommend sticking with Yahoo or Google, just for sheer data integrity issues.
There is a rails plugin, that adds some nice helpers to Activerecord. At the moment the main project is not rails 3 compatible, but there is at least one fork that has updated for rails 3.