Mozilla Location Service

» see location.services.mozilla.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Ask a laptop with no GPS receiver in it where it is and it answers anyway, which always struck me as the more interesting of the two tricks. My working life sits on the other side of that problem, where a position comes off hardware you can point at. The browser's version is a database question instead. Somebody has to have walked past your street with a phone logging every wifi name it could hear.

Mozilla built the public copy of that database. Mozilla Location Service launched in 2013 and did one thing: you sent it the access points and cell towers your device could currently hear, and it sent back a guess at where you were standing. The data came from volunteers, most of it out of Firefox for Android rather than the dedicated Stumbler app, which is to say it came from ordinary people carrying a browser around a city.

By february 2019 it held roughly 1.45 billion unique wifi networks and 44 million cell networks. It was the only database of that size not owned by a company that also wanted to sell you something, and the free desktop leaned on it without thinking. GeoClue, which answers the location question on a GNOME machine, called Mozilla by default, and the microG project, which exists so an android phone can work without Google on it, used the same endpoint.

On 13 march 2024 Mozilla announced the retirement. New API keys stopped being issued that day and the database dumps came down on 10 april. On 12 june every key that was not Mozilla's own stopped working. The repository moved to GitHub in archive mode on 31 july. Nothing broke loudly, because the things that depended on it were the quiet parts of other people's software.

~ the record ~

~ the patent ~

The stated reason was declining accuracy, and that is true as far as it goes, but the accuracy declined for a reason. Skyhook Holdings, which built the commercial version of the same database and licensed it to Apple in the iPhone's first years, asserted patents against Mozilla in 2019. What followed was not a court ruling. It was a settlement out of court that capped Mozilla's commercial traffic at a hundred thousand requests a day.

A location database is only as good as the rate it gets refreshed at, because routers get replaced and households move. Cap the queries and you cap the corrections that ride back in with them, and the map ages quietly. The service was not really shut down in 2024. It was throttled in 2019 and switched off five years later, once the decay had gone far enough that switching it off looked like a technical decision rather than a legal one.

~ who has one now ~

Two companies hold a database of that size, and both run one because it makes their own phones work rather than out of any interest in mapping the world's radio noise. Everything else is a licensing agreement with a price attached. The projects that fell over when the keys expired moved to a paid provider or to nothing, and a phone deliberately built to avoid Google lost its default source of position in one afternoon.

People are rebuilding it, since the ingredients were never secret and there are still phones walking around. What went missing is the middle ground, the arrangement where a nonprofit could hold public infrastructure at that scale and hand it out for free. That turns out to be legally expensive to keep standing, which is the whole of this grave in one sentence.

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