public class LocationButton

A button that asks for the device location once, for a single transaction.

This is the Codename One face of the platform’s own location button. From Android 17 (API level 37) Google Play requires transactional precise-location use – “find restaurants near me”, filling in an address, tagging a photo – to go through a button the system draws, rather than through an app-held ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION grant. A tap on a button the system drew earns a session-scoped grant, so the application never has to hold precise location permanently.

LocationButton b = new LocationButton(LocationButton.TEXT_USE_PRECISE_LOCATION);
b.addLocationSharedListener(loc -> {
    if (loc != null) {
        search(loc.getLatitude(), loc.getLongitude());
    }
});
form.add(b);

Where the system draws it, and where it does not

On a platform that has such a control – today only Android 17 and up – this component is that control: it is rendered by the system in its own process and this application cannot restyle its label or intercept its taps, which is exactly what makes the grant trustworthy. Everywhere else, and on older Android, the component is an ordinary Codename One Button that asks for the location permission the usual way. Either way the listener receives a Location or null, so an application is written once.

isSystemRendered() reports which of the two this button ended up with, for an application that wants to say something different about it. Ask com.codename1.ui.Display#isLocationButtonSupported() instead when the question is what the platform can do rather than what happened here.

On Android

Referencing this class makes the build add USE_LOCATION_BUTTON to the manifest, which the platform requires before it will render the control. Nothing else is needed.

The build also decides how to declare ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION. An application that uses this component and nothing else from the location or maps packages gets it declared onlyForLocationButton, which means the system grants precise location through the button and never any other way – no “allow precise location” question, and nothing to justify to Google Play. An application that also tracks, navigates or geofences needs the ordinary grant and gets the ordinary declaration. The class scan the build already runs answers this, so neither case needs a build hint.

android.locationButton.exclusive (auto, true, false) overrides it, for an application whose location use that scan cannot see – native Android code reaching the platform’s own location APIs is the case that matters. Writing the declaration by hand through android.xpermissions is not the way to ask for it: the build cannot check a hand-written fragment against the compile SDK, and onlyForLocationButton is an API 37 value that AAPT rejects below it.