Background / network location errors

[foolishgrunt]

In the interest of not cluttering the issues page, I'm reporting two issues here. Let me know if it would be better to split them.

I'm using a Pixel 3a on LineageOS with Microg. And after a recent trip, two issues have come to my attention that severely limit the usefulness of Zood:

1. It appears that my location is not updated to the person I'm sharing my location with unless Zood is open and in the foreground. I have granted the app permission to access my location at all times, and when I check the last use of the location permission in the App Info screen, it does appear to be using it but the person with whom I'm sharing my location does not see my position update.
   This may or may not be related, but when I open Zood, for a brief moment I'm shown the red error bar reading "Unable to communicate with Zood server." At the same time, my location marker on the maps appears unchanged from the last time I had the app open, and it takes a few moments to a few seconds to update to my current location.

2. It appears to only successfully identify my location in areas where GPS is available. If I am indoors, where no GPS is available but where network location can at least give me a rough location (as confirmed by both CoMaps and Here WeGo), Zood appears to report no location.

[arashpayan]

Hi @foolishgrunt.

It sounds like the app is not being awoken periodically as it should be by the Android Work Manager The app itself does not use any alarms to force the app awake. It relies on Work Manager to periodically wake it and let it find your location. Can you take a look at the logcat of your phone and search for any log messages that contain LW.doWork? That string gets logged as part of log messages from the app's LocationWorker that is awoken by the Android Work Manager.

Another possibility might be the way the app is being closed. Do you happen to swipe apps away from the app switcher when you're done using them? If so, Android interprets that as a signal that you don't want the app to receive any background execution time.

[foolishgrunt]

I don't know the preferred method for collecting the logcat, but connecting to my PC and running adb logcat > log.Txt returns no instance of "LW.dowork" in the file.

Typically I do close apps by swiping from the selector screen, but when I was testing Zood on this trip, I made a point not to and to just leave it open in the background. This did not seem to make a difference.