Problems with Ingress teleporting to random locations?

HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

Ingress has been behaving strangely for me recently, and I'm wondering if anyone else has seen this behavior. I live in a dense urban area and typically I see dozens of portals when I open my scanner, but sometimes I get teleported to some random location which is often far away from where I am. Right now the scanner thinks I'm 55.6 km from my actual location. PoGo shows the same thing. Eventually I'll bounce back home but sometimes I keep jumping between home and the Random Nowhere du Jour for a while.

If I fire up Google Maps it shows my location accurately every single time.

Sometimes I'll figure out where Niantic thinks I am by looking at the distance to three different keys then drawing circles to see where they overlap. I live in Oakland, roughly at the blue pin, and right now Ingress has me somewhere southwest of Petaluma. Sometimes I can identify the location because there are portals visible, and on one case I found myself in the bay near the San Leandro marina, but there have been quite a few locations that I haven't identified. I know this has been happening since at least July, because I have a chat log of being teleported to Livermore on that date.

I'm using a Pixel 6 Pro and T-Mobile, and the latest Android release (unmodified).

Has anyone else seen this behavior?

Screenshots below: The view from my scanner for tonight's teleport, where the three circles overlapped and a (slightly fuzzed) blue pin for my actual location, the pin for where Ingress thinks I am.



Comments

  • SSSputnikSSSputnik ✭✭✭✭✭

    Not that far. A block maybe? Try disabling WiFi?

  • It's because the Android Network Provider regarding your location returned wrong results due to inaccurate WIFI positioning. Is there any new WIFI hotspot or SSID around you?

  • Kevinsky86Kevinsky86 ✭✭✭
    edited December 2022

    As @sakumomo1203 already stated, i will almost guarantee there's a new accesspoint that used to exist at the location your are teleported to.

    Had this myself after a move. If I opened Ingress in the bathroom (no GPS reception) it'd spawn me at my old adress on initial launch. This took a multitude of weeks before Google's allseeing eye finally figured out my access points physically moved.

    I'd recommend avoiding interacting with the scanner when this happens...

    Pretty sure you can disable anything other then GPS for location tracking on Android which kind of patches this.

  • liyu1liyu1 ✭✭✭

    A few years ago pogo put me in the airport of dublin (never been there) (or in spain) while i was in belgium 😅. I was in a tunnel when it happened.

  • GrogyanGrogyan ✭✭✭✭✭

    Yes, I have this before and beginning to see it again.


    Issue is because the GPS info in our devices is being truncated by 1 digit, which is less than 1m of accuracy.

    Niantic thinks this is impossible, so it flings you a nearby road before returning when your GPS location changes by 1m


    Our modern mobiles are able to have sub meter accuracies, but Niantic have not updated their code to recognize this.


    It may be the issue seen with players from both games being falsely banned because their devices are reporting super accurate positioning compared to what the backend code expects

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    Interesting. I understand all of these hypotheses but I'm not sure any of them make sense.

    There are roughly eleventy billion wifi networks within range of me right now. Some come and go but for the most part there's a stable core. I too have been on the receiving end of teleporting to a wacky place (I wound up in Korea once while everyone around me was correctly positioned in California, and we were all on the same hotspot) but those have been weird one-off issues and not consistent. If it was confused by a particular new router wouldn't it teleport me to a predictable location? Also, if it's Android Network Provider wouldn't Google Maps also show the wrong location?

    I also grok truncation, but logically this seems like it should fling me to somewhere nearby rather than 50km away. I've had plenty of cases of my location randomly drifting around my neighborhood by a couple of blocks in both ingress in PoGo.

    @Kevinsky86 Ah, thank you for reminding me to think about that. It almost always happens when I'm in the center of my building (a 100-year-old converted warehouse) rather than near the windows so losing GPS signal is certainly a contributing factor.

  • SSSputnikSSSputnik ✭✭✭✭✭

    I dunno, but my drift with wifi on is more wacky than not having it on.

  • I started experiencing significant GPS drift with my old iPhone XR on T-Mobile when it was a couple years old, but not nearly as far as you. It seemed to happen if my phone was too hot or cold or when I walked close to old buildings.

    I upgraded to an iPhone 11 less than a year ago and haven’t had any issues.

  • liyu1liyu1 ✭✭✭

    According to ingress i walked 100 km this week. but thats not correct, my game is drifting a lot when i'm at work 🙈.

    (Good for pogo though to hatch my eggs).

  • EvilSuperHerosEvilSuperHeros ✭✭✭✭✭

    I've been seeing it for the past week or so. When you bring the app up from the background, it will "teleport" you somewhere else you either were recently, or looked at remotely. Like this morning, I looked at a portal remotely via comms. I've seen that location at least 3x after bringing the app back up from the background. A week ago Sunday a traveler mentioned she saw the same thing. Bringing her client up from minimized, she saw portals from her home area over 500 miles away.

    Sometimes it will hang out there a few seconds, sometimes almost long enough to entice you to try to hack or pew pew the portals.


    It's occurring on the most recent client version as well as the previous for me (Android user).

  • TheKingEngineTheKingEngine ✭✭✭✭✭

    It's a new bug which is slightly different from OP's. Still it's a bug. It will occur not only in Remote Portal View but also in the Drone View. Not sure why Ingress Prime client will bring the location of player to those destinations temporarily upon viewing portals. Can clearly notice the golden action circle which indicates the location change. Unfortunately I don't know how to steadily reproduce this bug to report it.

  • EvilSuperHerosEvilSuperHeros ✭✭✭✭✭

    I drift quite a bit when I'm at work. Granted I think most of that is where I'm at in the building. With my old Samsung S9 or my new Pixel 7, I still drift like crazy around my office. If I leave my phone open and on the Ingress client, I can easily complete capsules in half an hour while sitting at my desk. I also have noticed when I'm sleeping and my phone is on it's wireless charger, I tend to get some drift as well.

    Fun part of all of this? I rarely ever use Wi-Fi for anything. Ie my new Pixel has never been on the Wi-Fi at work and I only had it on Wi-Fi at home when I set it up the first time.

  • starwortstarwort ✭✭✭✭✭

    I see this sort of thing as well, but I think it's only a screenshot that appears momentarily and not an active scanner at the distant location. It disappears too quick for me to investigate; but one time the appearing-and-disappearing view had sign-in buttons on it whereas the real scanner was signed in already (but it was not long after the Ingress servers threw a wobbly and I'd had to sign in again).

  • EvilSuperHerosEvilSuperHeros ✭✭✭✭✭

    I remote viewed a local agent running battle beacons (rare) this morning. Since then I've closed my client for maybe 30 minutes, and a second time for over an hour. After opening the client, minimizing/background the app and opening back up, I popped back up to where the beacons were for a good 10 Mississippi count before I popped back to where I am (over 10 km away). I just cleared the cache, so going to test later on and see if that makes any difference or not.

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    @EvilSuperHeros Oh! That's an interesting bug. It's very different from the one that I'm seeing, since I've never been to the places that I'm teleporting to nor have I ever viewed anything there in the scanner before getting randomly teleported.

  • EvilSuperHerosEvilSuperHeros ✭✭✭✭✭

    Clearing cache seems to fix it for the moment. But I'm guessing as soon as I start filling up my cache with more remote viewing or such, it will come back. Time will tell. I will play some on the way home if I have time and then report back if I'm able to replicate the issue.

  • EvilSuperHerosEvilSuperHeros ✭✭✭✭✭

    I sometimes "teleport" when I'm at work and GPS can't lock properly. Sitting in or near a lab area with 40-50+ Point of Sale (POS) machines or the building's construction might cause it. I usually end up a few miles south or south west of the office.

  • SSSputnikSSSputnik ✭✭✭✭✭

    Getting this as well. Seems to be a new 'feature'.

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