Mozilla announced it is retiring its Mozilla Location Service because of decreasing accuracy as the result of patent issues.

Mozilla Location Service is a popular alternative to Google’s location services, especially for those concerned with privacy. Unfortunately, a patent issue in 2019 has made it difficult for Mozilla to make improvements to the service, including in the realm of accuracy, as explained in a GitHub post:

The accuracy of Mozilla Location Service (MLS) has steadily declined. With no plans to restart the stumbler program or increase investments to MLS we have made the decision to retire the service.

In 2013, Mozilla launched MLS as an open service to provide geolocation lookups based on publicly observable radio signals. The service received community submissions of GPS data from the open source MozStumbler Android app. In 2019, Skyhook Holdings, Inc contacted Mozilla and alleged that MLS infringed a number of its patents. We reached an agreement with Skyhook that avoided litigation. This required us to make changes to our MLS policies and made it difficult for us to invest in and expand MLS. In early 2021, we retired the MozStumbler program.

We are grateful for the contributions of the community to MLS to both the code and the dataset. To minimize disruptions and allow people time to make alternative arrangements, we have created a schedule that implements the retirement in stages. The retirement plan can be tracked in this issue.

The retirement will be completed in phases. Beginning today, there will be no new API access keys granted. Mozilla will stop accepting POST data submissions to the API on March 27, and April 10 will begin the deletion process for cell data downloads. June 12 will mark the removal of third party API keys, with the service only being used as needed internally by Mozilla. The GitHub repo will close July 31.