Meteor MongoDb findOne $near not always working - ios

Question

I really don't get it. I have the following code in a Meteor (v1.3.3, MongoDb v2.6.7) app running on my iPhone, and it does not always work. Sometimes it does, and other times it doesn't:
Places = new Mongo.Collection("places");
if(Meteor.isServer) {
Places._ensureIndex({'loc':'2dsphere', name: 1});
}
if(Meteor.isClient) {
var maxDistance = 50;
...
latLng = Geolocation.latLng();
if (! latLng)
{
console.warn('Could not get location!');
return;
}
console.log('location: ' + latLng.lat + ' (' + typeof latLng.lat + '), ' + latLng.lng + ' (' + typeof latLng.lng + ')');
var placeNearby = Places.findOne({
loc: {
$near: {
$geometry: {
type: "Point",
coordinates: [latLng.lng, latLng.lat]
},
$maxDistance: maxDistance //meters
}
}
});
...
}
After I fetch placeNearby, I do a console.log('placeNearby', placeNearby). There are times when it does find a place and some other times it does not.
I am running this on my iPhone 5s (iOS 9) though Xcode:
meteor run ios-device --mobile-server http://10.0.1.10:3000
I am always at the same place when I test this. I thought it might be because of GPS coordinates imprecision, so I increased maxDistance to 50000, but it did not change anything. The funny thing is that my console.log does not output undefined for placeNearby. It seems to be outputting an empty string.
However, if I enter the following query in MongoDb terminal, it retrieves some results:
db.places.find({
loc: {
$near: {
$geometry: {
type: "Point",
coordinates: [-73.56737205923496, 45.50178023952462]
},
$maxDistance: 50 //meters
}
}
})

Answer 1

It was a stupid error. I had forgotten that I had turned off wifi on the iPhone, so it was not able to communicate with the local server. This being said, I would not have thought that a connection with the server was necessary. I thought all the data was being copied to the minimongo database on the client side, and that the app could run independently.
I am wondering now if there is a way to publish a Meteor app that can run locally on the device all by itself. I read a bit about GroudDB, but was not able to find any documentation about geometry queries using $near with GroundDB.