How can I enable or disable the GPS programmatical

Question

I know that the question about turning on/off GPS programatically on android has been discussed many times, and the answer is always the same:

"You can't for security/privacy reasons, you have to forward to location preferences screen and let the user enable/disable it."

I understand that, however I recently bought Tasker from the market and, among many other things that you can accomplish with it, you can set rules to auto-enable GPS on entering pre-determined applications and disable it on exit (see here for the tutorial on how to do it, and it just works!) and this app can't be signed with the firmware signing key as it works on many android versions and different devices and you don't even need to be rooted.

I would like to do this in my app. Of course, I don't want to blow up the users privacy, so I would first ask the user if he wants to turn it on automatically with the typical "remember my decision" checkbox and if he answers yes, enable it.

Does anybody have any idea or clue on how Tasker achieves this?

Answer 1

Things have changed since this question was posted, now with new Google Services API, you can prompt users to enable GPS:

https://developers.google.com/places/android-api/current-place

You will need to request ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION permission in your manifest:

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION" />

Also watch this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0Kh_RnSM0w