There are certain common uses of continuous sampling of the exact location of a phone that are/could be baked into Glide’s underlying functionality with the assurance that these values cannot be stored.
Use cases include:
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the (currently implemented in the Data Editor) Distance to Location action: Return the distance from where the phone is currently located to a specific location.
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Show the phone’s current position on a map – a feature request that has been made, but not implemented today. I am hopeful that this will appear before long.
Note: you can get several useful location capabilities today by going to another app on the phone that will provide this functionality showing position as well as driving/walking/cycling directions. On an iPhone when you tap on a map component (not the map of multiple items), the Apple Maps app (known to exist on all iPhones) will be fired up giving you these capabilities.
BUT, from a User Experience (UX), this is an interruption to the use of the Glide app. It would be better if the map component implemented these two capabilities directly. I assume on an Android phone the standard app GoogleMaps (similarly known to exist on all Android phones) is fired up when you tap on a map component.
We need to catalog these approaches to support the most common use cases for the current position while still limiting the ability to track a user. That, after all, is what it means to build applications without having to write programs – a worthy goal.
Although I understand the reason for restricting the permission to look at your location to one sample, I think this reduces the power of location-awareness because in some sense, tracking the position of a person is an important and useful capability. For example, on a walking tour (my current interest) it is nice to be able to see if you are walking in the right direction. This does not work if the user has to give permission every time the current location is sampled. Clearly, the functionality of tracking (with the standard blue dot) the location of the phone could be done inside map component without the ability to get ahold of the value of the location BUT, there are other potential uses of the current location that are not covered by tracking current location with a blue dot.
I wonder if the standard way I have seen used of asking permission at the start of an app (or perhaps every period of time) would be a reasonable compromise. Those users who do not want to be tracked at all would be able to deny permission once at the start of the app (or every period of time) in which case functionality that needs multiple updates of location could be disabled. This would be better than asking permission every time the current position is requested.