Don’t worry your gut feeling is right. Wifi / Bluetooth scans are orders of magnitude cheaper. People in here don’t unterstand how localization works.

Thats what I am saying :) wifi scans are cheap compared to booting up GPS.

ITT people not understanding that non-de-googled android phones use that method for localization by default, falling back to GPS only when WiFi trilateration fails.

It is a smart robust way for localization and beacondb breaks the data monopoly.

Power consumption is way lower and satellite acquisition takes time (or you keep your GPS running and warm/hot-start, but that draws even more power)

what are you talking about? GPS is far from a “passive receiver” in any sense of that vague term. It’s running an oscillator at the carrier frequency.

GPS is probably the most power hungry sensor on your device.