Sharing location via magic earth without GPS on

[MaxO]

Hi!
Today I wanted to share a location (not my actual one) in magic earth, but it doesnt let me because I GPS wasnt activated.
Is that a bug? My location is completely irrelevant for sharing some distant location from the map.
And is there a way to to ot any other way via magic earth?
I know there are other ways and apps to do it, but I really like magic earth and would prefer not to have multiple apps for something like this…

[aibd]

I can share a location using Magic Earth by long press on the map to create a “marker pin”. The bottom part of the screen is now the “sub-menu” for the pin. Tap the sub-menu, tap on the “share” icon.

[MaxO]

You are right, I just was to stupid to see it.
Thanks a lot!

[MaxO]

And is there a way to share the location in a format that does work independently of what navigation app the receiver uses?
Or at least other apps, like the ubiquitous gmaps?

[aibd]

I have not fully researched this, but so far I notice the recipient reports getting different formats by different share methods.

You might get insight by: take a pin in an urban area, share via copy to clipboard, paste on a notepad.

Quite often that output is a combination / one or more of:

• an address
• lat long coordinates
• what I call a “google friendly” rough location, often in format abcde fghijk. My impression is that this format has some relation to local neighbourhood / county names
• a “long version” of the above

(In this example from suburban London, the format does not include my type 3)

Address: Croham Road, London Borough of Croydon, London, United Kingdom
Latitude: 51.35967687
Longitude: -0.08230531
https://magicearth.com/?show_on_map&lat=51.35967687&lon=-0.08230531&name=Croham%20Road&str=Croham%20Road&sett=London%20Borough%20of%20Croydon&city=London&ctry=United%20Kingdom&img_id=6008

I just confirmed that google_maps_html will accept and find pure coordinates, but google device owners tell me such links I have provided, do not work for them; format

51.35967687,-0.08230531

Possible reasons for failure of “pure coordinates”, both telegram and SMS in these cases turned the data into links used to open telephone dialer !

[pealfa]

That is what I am saying in this thread:
I recently had to help a friend who I have installed /e/OS on her phone. She wanted to share a location, not her location at the time, with the Magic Earth app.
When I finally find how to do it there is a big problem: the person receiving it either has that app installed (and the link opens in it, of course) or receives a web link that simply tells them to install the app.
So I installed another one from F-droid, specifically Organic Maps. Here it does share correctly: it sends a link that the receiver can view as an OSM web map. And there appears a button to ‘view in app’ in case you have it installed.
This kind of issues are very important, because they give the impression that the system is closed (only people with the same system can understand each other) and people who come from Gmaps are used to everything is simple and easy, causing the rejection that we Linux users recognize.
I hope you find it useful if you have the same problem.

[Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)]

[MaxO]

Thank you.
My workaround is to use the GMaps WV (from f-droid) to share the location.
Works for the G-crowd, but also for Magic Earth and probably other apps too.

[tcecyk]

@MaxO

And is there a way to share the location in a format that does work independently of what navigation app the receiver uses?

Using coordinates prefixed with geo: is quite an universal way to share location. Addresses are in the form of geo:0,0?q=arbitrary text for an address

I was recently looking into this, did contact MagicEarth (with a reply) and pushing an old bug entry for this and Manoj did reopen the issue. But it’s up to ME developers to make time for this.

@MaxO

… other apps, like the ubiquitous gmaps?

Organicmaps can handle most of them, but doesn’t generate them. But it’s a good app to handle incoming Google Maps location shares: Location location location (google link) - #3 by tcecyk - MagicEarth can handle some of the Google Maps. But both apps obviously don’t generate gmaps-type location share links. They should use geo:-urls too (they don’t as of now. Organicmaps has plenty of issues on it).