What is Error - Unable to Retrieve Location?

There may be occasions where you – or your sitters – experience the error message (see below) on your phones when out on a visit and you try to check-in or check-out.

Please read the following information as this will  enable you to gain an understanding as to why this sometimes occurs, and which aspects of this issue our Support Team are able to help with.

When you press the "check out" button, Pet Sitter Plus  asks the phone for a set of geographic location coordinates. Every  phone has a function called "location services" and provided that this  is enabled, then the phone will be engaged in constant activity to  derive its current location. If the phone really does not have any idea  where it is (geographically), then after 10 seconds, Pet Sitter Plus  will "time out" with the error you see above. Pet Sitter Plus is reliant  entirely on the phone "knowing" where it is in order to complete the  check-out function and if the phone does not know where it is, then this  error message can sometimes be seen.

The easy part of the process is the part that the Pet  Sitter Plus software does – ie. to ask the phone for its location. The  hard part – and the clever bit (working out the location) – is what the  phone does in combination with a service provider (eg. AT&T, Sprint,  Vodafone etc.) and this is precisely what "location services" does on  any phone.

Location services uses a combination of technologies,  including GPS (satellites) and tower (mast) triangulation, to derive a  set of current location coordinates which are then fed to Pet Sitter  Plus when we ask for them. If the location information is not available -  you see the error above.

The honest answer is that "we do not know" what the circumstances were at that moment in time when the phone tried to work  out where it was.

There are lots of possibilities, for example, a  particular service provider might be having difficulty due to tower  maintenance. If a tower has gone down in a particular area, then  location services could be affected, but these are our best guesses, we  do not know. Other environmental factors, like the weather conditions,  have been known to cause network issues at times. Sometimes this type of  issue resolves itself very quickly, so your connection issues appear "random" to you.

The first thing to look at is your network "Service  Provider". Are the phones that are giving you the problem connected via a  common service provider – such as Vodafone – if that were the case, you  could contact Vodafone to see if they have any maintenance work being  undertaken in your area. If the service provider is not common, then you  could call any of them to find out if they know of any maintenance work going on in the area.