Zephr.xyz powers real-time GNSS precision on Android with Google Cloud

We’ve all experienced situations where the little blue dot on our map doesn’t accurately show where you are located. Your rideshare arrives on the wrong side of the street, you miss a turn while driving, or the friend you know that you beat on your morning run has a faster time in their fitness tracking app. 

Despite significant advancements in GPS technology, achieving reliable, decimeter-level accuracy on consumer devices remains a formidable challenge. Traditional GPS systems can offer positioning, accurate to a few meters, but only under ideal, open-sky conditions. In the real-world, multipath errors, atmospheric disturbances, and signal blockage can all drastically degrade location accuracy, especially in urban, dense, and indoor environments. 

This level of uncertainty not only causes inconvenience, it restricts real-time applications,  such as augmented reality, navigation apps, targeted ads, and even emergency responders. These are just a fraction of the cases where precise positioning is critical for enhancing user experiences and operational effectiveness.

Zephr.xyz wants to solve challenges like these, and many more. Zephr wants to reimagine GPS for mobile devices, delivering its next-generation GNSS positioning and localization SDK, designed specifically for Android devices and running on Google Cloud. 

Reimagining GPS for better precision, and better experiences

By harnessing Google Cloud’s powerful infrastructure, Zephr seamlessly coordinates raw GNSS measurements from multiple Android smartphones, as well as enhanced atmospheric and orbits data, to generate anonymized corrections across a cooperative network of devices. 

This real-time processing dramatically reduces GPS errors, consistently achieving open-sky accuracies below 50 centimeters and significantly enhancing reliability in urban and obstructed scenarios. Across more than 50 tests in a variety of geographies, Zephr has improved the positioning accuracy of smartphones by over 2x.

Zephr efficiently manages vast amounts of location data streams and performs rapid optimizations necessary for real-time corrections and positioning with Google Cloud's scalable and robust solutions, including Cloud Run, Cloud Storage, and Pub/Sub. Google Cloud’s infrastructure enables low-latency, high-performance computing, ensuring the Zephr SDK meets stringent demands for latency-sensitive applications.

Here is a diagram of how we built it:

Zephr’s Android SDK securely transmits raw GNSS measurements to 5G-compatible API endpoints. Using Cloud Run to scale out data processing and APIs, the SDK generates optimized corrections unique to each device — in real time. In addition, Firebase checks that the appropriate corrections are delivered securely to each specific authenticated client running the Zephr SDK. The Zephr positioning engine then determines a precise location on-device, ensuring both privacy and resilience to network outages, while managing battery usage.

Building location-based solutions for tomorrow

Zephr’s unique cooperative positioning harnesses network effects — each device contributes to and benefits from collective positioning data, creating resilience and precision previously unattainable on commodity hardware. This approach allows Zephr to provide both single receiver and multi-receiver corrections, depending on the density of devices in a given location. Real-time localization, which underpins Zephy’s AI audio navigation assistant, is critical for enabling next-generation AI devices. 

Partnering closely with Google Cloud, has helped Zephr to rapidly scale its backend infrastructure, crucially supporting its ambitious goal of setting a new standard in GNSS accuracy and reliability across diverse use cases globally. Leveraging cloud-powered, cooperative GNSS solutions provides businesses and developers immediate access to unprecedented accuracy, opening new opportunities for innovation.

Discover how Zephr.xyz and Google Cloud can enhance the accuracy and reliability of your location-based services. Learn more at Zephr.xyz.