How Core Location Works

Location is meaningful. Cocoa Touch understands that. Where we compute is fast becoming just as important as how we compute and what we compute. iOS is constantly on the go, traveling along with its users throughout the course of the day, at home and on the road. Core Location integrates the device’s mobility into application development.

Core Location addresses location-based programming. It enables applications to hook into location-aware Web APIs. It helps you provide geotagged content to your user and lets your user search for local resources such as restaurant and event listings. With on-demand geolocation, mobile computing opens itself up to a wide range of Web 2.0 API libraries.

All these features depend on one thing: location. And it’s up to Core Location to tell your application where your users are. iOS uses several methods to locate you. Together, this approach is called assisted GPS (or A-GPS). The following sections provide a rundown of the ways devices can detect and report position with A-GPS.