Geoloqi wants to make GPS less of a drain on your battery

Geoloqi – maker of the eponymous location sharing app for Android and iOS – has released an SDK that opens up their location-based services to other app developers. Why should you, the customer, find this interesting? Because Geoloqi has added some ‘special sauce’ that lets them significantly reduces battery drain when using their geolocation services.

Which is fantastic, as one of the biggest problems with using GPS for apps right now is it kills your battery like no ones’ business. How does Geoloqi pull this trick off? They’ve implemented algorithms that are smart enough to know when they actually need to turn GPS on or off, or how frequently they need to ping towers.

Other location-driven events, known as “geofences”, can trigger an event based on proximity. Groupon-like companies could trigger sales offers being sent if you were close to a participating store, for example. While geofences aren’t new to Geoloqi, their implementation is smart enough to know to only turn on GPS when course location shows you approaching a geofence.

With software advances like this, we may be entering an age when we can use location-based services all the time, without a huge hit to our batteries. And that would be a very good thing for all of us.