Earendil

Swift Package for fetching approximate user location without asking for their permission 👺.

Get their country, subregion or continent with one method call. This includes country names, their coordinates and even MKCoordinateRegion property, instantly usable with your MapKit views. Perfect for setting your Map's location for the first time, if you don't need GPS permission otherwise.

100% App Store safe, no-private APIs used.

Usage

Get the location at any time:

let userLocation = Earendil.inferredLocation

userLocation.country.name // "United States of America"
userLocation.country.region.center // (37.09, -95.7)
userLocation.country.region.span // (60, 60)

Use the inferred location for your needs:

let userLocation = Earendil.inferredLocation

// use location data as the first-time region displayed by the map
mapView.setRegion(userLocation.country.coordinateRegion, animated: true)

// use location title (ENG only) as a content of any label in your app
navigationItem.title = userLocation.region.name

// use location for analytics purposes
FirebaseAnalytics.logEvent(UserLocationEvent(userLocation))

What? How come? Why?

It's super simple - the idea is to fetch current OS system Locale (NSLocale.current), cast it back to Foundation's NSLocale and retrieve the two-character countryCode key. This key is mapped to internal json dataset, which contains names and coordinates for every worlds-location. That way there is no need to ask for any location permission. You can check it out right here: InferredLocationProvider.swift.

This approach has some consequences, mainly:

• Returned location (even for most granular level, country, is really very broad)
• Users travelling to another country won't update Earendil's location (which may even be desired).
• Setting location-agnostic Locale (such as eu instead of eu_ES or en instead of en_US) will prevent Earendil from getting proper location.

Installation

Available through Swift Package Manager - open up the xcode, type this repos URL and you are good to go.

Platform Availability

 iOS 14.0
 iPadOS 14.0
 macOS 11.0 Big Sur
 watchOS 7.0
 tvOS 14.0

also compliant with  Mac Catalyst