React-Native Background Location
A fully functional experience on Android
This post will cover a topic that has been key in many applications and will focus on a solution working fully on the background and the most interesting part of all: working from Android 4.4 (SDK 19) to the most recent version at the time of writing which is Android Oreo (SDK 27).
The purpose of the solution is not for real-time tracking, it’s to track a user location in small intervals (e.g. 5 or 10 minutes), but it could be taken to an extreme where you could try to get location updates on a much smaller interval (e.g. 1 minute).
Android 8 and its particularities
With Oreo, Google wanted to bring a few changes to the table, mainly regarding background services and background location.
The changes can be read with more detail in these two pages:
But I will give you a summary of what they are.
What motivated Google to do these changes was power and resource consumption by third party apps, or in other words, they want to better control their operating system environment by giving developers a more controlled freedom to develop. Which means we…
