Why is the android emulator innaccurate if i send a mock location?

Question

I just send some coordinates to the android emulator.

I used this commands for sending the fixes:

geo fix 8.494062000 52.038213000

This will send my emulator near the bielefeld university in the google maps app. The next command I issued was:

geo fix 8.495543000 52.038180000

Sadly my position does not change on the emulator. Even mytracks tells me in the logcat output that the position of the user has not changed.

geo fix 8.501787000 52.036614000 

and

geo fix 8.508524000 52.033138000

don't do anything either. And if the position changes it is nowhere near the position I recoreded the track at. All this coordinates are picked from a track that I recorded with my motorola droid with mytracks on a multiple kilometer streetcar ride. Loading the gpx file in google earth displays a neat and accurate overlay over the streetcar line. Playing the track as a gpx file gives me similar results. There are 300 points recorded but only 4 of them will change my position on the emulator.

Is there some kind of accuracy setting effecting the emulator? This way the load gpx track feature does not help a bit for testing.

Somebody else had strange issues with the load gpx file features?

Edit

This issue does not only affect the geo fix or load gpx file feature it affects all mock locations that are send to the emulator.

Answer 1

As far at the inaccuracy goes, a question I raised a while back regarding the emulator's behaviour: link text might shed some light on it. The mapview will only receive location updates if you move position more than a minimum number of metres as specified by the 3rd parameter when you invoke the requestLocationUpdates(). Bear in mind that on a great circle(latitude changes) 0.001 degrees is about 108 metres. For longitude changes it's 108m x cos(latitude).

(If I send your coordinates of 52.038213000, 8.494062000 from the emulator control in DDMS in Eclipse, the map centres on 52.04200, 8.49688 (rounded to 6 dec places))

Answer 2

Issue 11264 in the Android Bug tracking system states that there is a bug in the revision 0.9.8.v201008281755-53891 of the eclipse plugin or revision 7 of the android tools that leads to a truncation/rounding in the location after the second decimal place.

I hope this bug will be fixed soon. If this bug causes you any inconveniences please star the issue in the android bug tracking system.

As a work around you can go back to an older eclipse plugin. Version 0.9.6.v201002051504-24846 is working for me. However reverting the eclipse plugin does not prevent the console to act weird for the geo commands, only the sending of coordinates through eclipse will get fixed.