Android 15 is supposed to improve indoor navigation

Using your smartphone to guide you from A to B on the open road is currently child’s play. This works easily with applications such as Google Maps thanks to the GPS connection. Things look different inside buildings. Here the satellite signals are usually too weak to reliably determine the current position. There are already solutions available with ultra-broadband and WLAN, but they have so far been too imprecise and weak for large-scale use and have not yet been widely implemented. The biggest hope for the indoor navigation sector is the Wi-Fi 802.11az WLAN standard, also known as Wi-Fi ranging, published in March 2023.

The radio standard uses the WLAN access points in its area to determine positions with an accuracy of 0.4 meter tolerance. This surpasses previous solutions such as Wi-Fi RTT, which is also hardly supported by an access point. It is precisely this Wi-Fi 802.11az standard that keeps up Android 15 Moving onto modern smartphones. This is what the website reports Android Authority and citing Google’s documentation for the software. Accordingly, the latest version of the mobile operating system already supports this technology.

Great potential for commercial use

According to the report, Wi-Fi ranging doubles the bandwidth previously available for Wi-Fi positioning and also supports the 6 gigahertz band. This means that applications with large numbers of users can be scaled and could in future be used by supermarkets, for example, to find customers the products they are looking for. Last but not least, the new standard should offer more security than previous approaches. Despite the availability of the radio protocol under Android 15, it will probably take a while until perfect indoor navigation in everyday life.

On the one hand, only the radio modules of the latest smartphones support Wi-Fi ranging technology on the hardware side. On the other hand, access points with Wi-Fi 6 technology, which currently make up the lion’s share of all devices in use, also need the appropriate software update to make Wi-Fi 802.11az available.