FAQ: 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 – i.e. 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 (e.g. 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.