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No Access to Sprint LBS API for Small Companies
Posted April 18, 2006 – 4:28 pm by Yakov Shafranovich in Mobile, Projects, Technology(This is a followup on an earlier post about availability of GPS info on Sprint PCS’s CDMA network)
Recently I had a short email exchange with someone at Sprint about obtaining access to their LBS information for the use in my company’s products. My company targets a small vertical niche market and the reply from Sprint was basically along the lines of “we don’t deal with small fish”. This is a very unfortunate fact since it now seems that the mobile world is the last place where restrictions are put on users and developers solely for commercial gain - unlike the rest of the Internet. In any case, you can judge their reply for yourself:
The situation is this. Using the location capabilities on the CDMA platform requires partnership with Sprint. The economics of the underlying platform are such that access to the platform needs to be controlled and used by firms with compelling applications and offers which would appeal to a large number of potential customers. At the present time, the Business Solutions group is not accepting new partners, but plans to begin considering new applications in Q3 2006.We are in the process of coming up with some new business models which would open up this platform to developers such as yourselves who target more limited groups of customers. Unfortunately, those processes are not yet in place and will take some time to develop.
Tags: gps, java, lbs, sprintlbs, sprintpcs —
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4 Responses to “No Access to Sprint LBS API for Small Companies”
Do you still have that Qualcomm GPS library sitting around? I can’t seem to download it off their website, and would like to play around with it. I have an MM-7400 and developer root and a certificate.
Many thanks,
-elan
By elan on Apr 19, 2006
I’ve been hitting my head against the fact that as a j2me hobbyist, I’m not about to pay $500 for a Versign certificate just to play around with the restricted API’s on my sprint phone. Hopefully google queries will bring up this comment - you must both enable the root developer certificate on your sprint phone as well as pay for a code signing certificate from Versign - good deal, eh? It seems like an anathema to me that even though I own this phone, I cannot access all the features of an embedded API.
By Mike on Aug 7, 2006
You don’t need the certificate. Just edit brew/__policy.txt with BitPim to allow blanket(oneshot) access to the gps API for unsigned apps.
By Alexander R Pruss on Oct 11, 2006
I used the QJAE docs to reconstruct a large part of the package API (what I couldn’t do is the the numeric values of the static final constants, since the docs), and made a dummy package that does nothing, but can be linked against.
I managed to compile GpsTester (with some mods, but it would have compiled without them, too). My dummy library is at http://www.prussfamily.us/qjae.zip
Feel free to use it under the terms of the GPL 2 or the revised BSD license.
I don’t really know anything about java, so I may have screwed up bigtime.
But I dropped the dummy stuff in my src directory, generate a package with the Sprint SDK, then deleted com/* from the jar file since I didn’t want the dummy package going to the phone. It “worked” on my a880–while I couldn’t get a fix, it did ask for permission to connect to GPS and did give me a “GPS Timeout” error. A likely reason it didn’t work is I don’t have Vision.
As far as I know, what I did was legitimate, because the QJAE docs permit use to create an implementation, and that’s what I did–a dummy implementation. (If anybody complains, I’ll take it down, of course.)
By Alexander R Pruss on Oct 11, 2006