The Mozilla location service is an open and crowdsourced geolocation service.
Mozilla continues to decline and since the last decade, despite contributing ideas and projects, Mozilla has found itself financially unable to maintain each of the projects it has launched on the market.
Y Although the company could hide today with the issue of the Covid-19 pandemic, The truth is that the decline of Mozilla was signed since Google Chrome came to take away the user market and with it the profits that the browser had plummeted.
With that, a large number of Mozilla services and projects have gone down in history or have passed into the hands of the community to continue the development of these projects that at the time promised a lot. Although even Mozilla has had to reduce its workforce on several occasions, the funds to maintain its projects are simply not enough or that is at least what Mozilla tells us on this occasion.
This time Mozilla announced the bad news that it has made the decision to stop supporting the “Mozilla Location Service” (MLS) service., a project developed by Mozilla since 2013 to provide a public geographic location determination service based on information from Wi-Fi access points, base stations of mobile operators and IP addresses issued to the subscriber. However, the project has been closed due to several factors.
Since 2019, MLS faced limitations due to patent infringement allegations and an out-of-court settlement that placed restrictions on the number of API calls per day for commercial projects. This led to decreased accuracy and loss of appeal for Mozilla, especially after some projects refused to use MLS due to restrictions.
The accuracy of Mozilla Location Service (MLS) has steadily decreased. With no plans to restart the Stumbler program or increase investments in MLS, we have made the decision to retire the service.
Lack of additional investment and downward trend on location accuracy, along with a lack of interest in reviving programs like MozStumbler, have been cited as reasons for the project's closure. MozStumbler, which was part of the old Firefox for Android, also stopped development, contributing to the decline of new data for the MLS database.
Although alternatives such as TowerCollector and open databases such as OpenCellID exist, the relevance of location information linked to MLS has decreased significantly, leading to the closure of the project by Mozilla.
About the case, too Mozilla shared a schedule that implements the retirement in stages. The service elimination plan will be carried out in 5 stages
- Starting March 13: Issuance of new API access keys stops.
- March 27: Accepting POST data requests through the API stops, and publishing new database dumps for export to other systems also stops.
- On April 10: All previously published database dumps are removed and are no longer available for download.
- June 12: All API access keys are removed, except keys used in Mozilla projects.
- On July 31: The repository with the platform code will be transferred to GitHub in archive mode for those who wish to reactivate the service and maintain it internally.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that all is not lost, since Mozilla mentions that the source code of the MLS application, Mozilla Ichnaea, will continue to be available under the Apache 2.0 license and it is expected that someone or some community will take action on the matter and continue with the project.
If you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details In the following link.