Fleet tracking - Retrieving location data from cellphones, C# libraries

Question

Hello -
I need to retrieve latitude & longitude information from cellphones carried by delivery trucks. I've found a few examples of how this can be done here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.01.wm6gps.aspx
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/mobile/DeepCast.aspx

Is it possible to retrieve cell phone location information from a server side application? Could the server obtain permission from the cellphone without the need to install an application on the cellphone itself?

Obviously, I don't have experience with cell phone application development, so I'm just looking for some general guidelines for developing an app. that could pull this information from a variety of cell phones.

I am hoping that I wouldn't need to develop an application for a bazillion different cell phone operating systems. Is there a standard platform I should code for.
I am an asp.net, c# developer.

Thanks for any advice.

Answer 1

I would think you'd have to have a small app running on the phones that sends the GPS coordinates to your server. The implications of being able to just retrieve the location of a random phone at any given time are a little scary...

Given your background I'd be tempted to code up the phone side of the app for Windows Mobile first, at least that way you can use C#. I'd also restrict the supported phones to a few models, otherwise you'll spend more time writing the minimal phone apps than developing the part that adds business value to the system.

Answer 2

I've just coded up a simple application on a blackberry that reads the gps location. This is really easy and sending to a remote server is also trivial.

However you need the software to run on the cell phone in order to access the APIs to access GPS locations. You can't access the locations without software on the phones.

If you have internal access to the network operator there are some things that can be done, but that becomes a lot harder.

I suspect that other makes of mobiles will be very similar. In fact, as the take up of GPS in mobiles becomes higher and higher, I would expect access to GPS information would become even more restrictive as people become worried about privacy.