Foreground location tracking is easy — the app is open, the user can see the battery cost, and Android doesn't fight you. Background tracking is where booking and delivery apps actually live or die, and it's a much harder problem.
The core trade-off
High-accuracy GPS polling every few seconds gives you a smooth live map and drains a phone in a few hours. Drop the polling frequency or accuracy to save battery, and the live tracking that customers rely on gets jumpy and unreliable. Across multiple production booking apps, tuning this trade-off — not the map UI, not the booking flow — was consistently the hardest engineering problem.
What actually worked
The fix wasn't one setting, it was adaptive behavior: tighter polling and higher accuracy only during an active trip, coarser and less frequent updates the rest of the time, and using Android's fused location provider instead of raw GPS so the OS can blend GPS, network, and sensor data at lower power cost. Foreground services with a persistent notification kept Android from killing the tracking process outright, which is a common failure mode once a phone's battery saver kicks in.
Why this matters before launch
This is the kind of problem that doesn't show up in a demo or on a charger — it shows up as 1-star reviews about battery drain three weeks after launch. Budget real device testing for this specifically, on cheap Android hardware with aggressive battery managers, not just flagship phones.
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