Unwired Labs, a leading provider of location technologies, announces the release of its Offline Location Library for Android devices. The library enables Android developers to create a faster, more consistent user experience by retrieving location context in milliseconds, even when GPS and internet connectivity are unavailable.

“Many mobile apps rely on location to provide a personalized user experience. Apps using our location library can increase user satisfaction and engagement by avoiding excessively long application launch times or serving users irrelevant content.” said Gopi Aravind, CEO of Unwired Labs.

This free library is designed to be a drop in replacement to Google Play’s Geolocation services. Android developers can view more details and download the library at https://github.com/unwiredlabs/location-library-docs

About Unwired Labs: Unwired Labs is a fast growing startup based in Hyderabad, India. They provide positioning solutions to enable connected devices to locate themselves globally without the need for GPS. Their clients range from Fortune 500 companies to startups in many verticals including the telecommunications, wireless, IoT/M2M, consumer electronics, fleet tracking and automotive industries.

Traditionally, Cell Tower based locations were fraught with issues of reliability; responses miles away from an actual location, in water bodies and in cases, no response at all.

Unwired Labs has done pioneering work to address each of these issues. Our R&D team is happy to announce a major update to internal algorithms. A lot of effort has gone into enabling our algorithms to auto-adapt based on the type of geography requested, correct for unclean data-sets (in case of crowd-sourced data) by intense cleansing of both contributor and customer data.

In terms of numbers,  this update increases the median accuracy of Cell Tower locations – when the request has multiple neighbours – by up-to 37%. With just a single cell, it increases accuracy by 16%. As a happy side-effect, the enhanced data-cleansing algorithms alone have improved WiFi accuracy by over 32%.

There’s a lot of on-going work on these algorithms, which are available in private BETA. If you’d like to get on an early BETA list, reach out to us!

As an API provider, we believe reliability comes first. Thousands of developers and companies on our platform use our service for non-trivial use cases and we do our bit to ensure high availability.

As a responsible company, we believe transparency in our operations comes immediately after reliability. Ask any customer and they’ll vouch for our honesty in all communications with them; whether it’s about accuracy estimates or system status.

Today, we’re going one step further to achieve this by launching a API availability dashboard that displays the real-time status of our API endpoints. We’ve integrated it with our internal monitoring tools so anyone else can view the status of our API in real-time.

You can also subscribe to the RSS feed or follow the twitter handle @unwired_status for notifications.

As always, please let us know what you think with a comment!

We have launched new endpoints in Asia (Singapore), USA West (San Francisco) and Europe (Amsterdam). Customers and developers in these regions can now enjoy low-latency access to our API. Along with the existing endpoints in USA East (New York) and Europe (Ireland), this launch increases the count of our global endpoints to 5.

The URLs to access each of our endpoints are listed here.

We’re excited to announce the Street Addresses (or reverse geocoding) feature on LocationAPI. With this launch, you can now request a physical street address along with the geolocation result.

To request an address, add the “address” parameter to your JSON request and set it’s value to “1” (without quotes). Please refer to the illustration below:

You can try this out live on our API page here. Happy locating!

We’re happy to launch an update version of our API v2.

Major changes include:

• Support for LTE technology with about 350,000 cells from 3 new data providers
• Reduced server response time to under 15ms
• New “radio” parameter that supports GSM, CDMA, UMTS and LTE cells

Please mail in your feedback to contact[at]unwiredlabs.com; we’d really appreciate it!

Happy locating!

Our 6500th user signed-up yesterday! That’s not all, we also reached 3 million API calls in the last 24 hours! This from just 100 users and 5000 API calls back in March!

We’d like to thank you, dear users, for getting us this far! We’d also like to thank Thomas Edison’s advice that helped us through tough times:

The three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are: Hard work, Stick-to-itiveness, and Common sense.
Thomas A. Edison