How to find user's country

Question

I am building a Cordova app for android platform.

I need to get the user's country.

I know that the geolocalisation gives the GPS coordinates.

Is there a way to have the country without using any external API? if not possible what is the best solution?

Answer 1

There's important difference from UX and legal perspective on what country do you need:

1. Country of current location: use geolocation API and any mapping solution. This is the only reliable way to determine country of location, since detection by IP or SIM card may only identify the country of telecom provider. Note, that country of the current location is not the country of citizenship and it does not allow to determine user's language or locale preferences.
2. Country as the context for localization: use ECMAScript Internationalization API[1] and cordova-globalization-plugin[2] as a fallback. Note, that these APIs do not provide location information at all: language and locale information are not the same as user's country (e.g. user may choose french locale and en_US language, while living in Monaco and being a citizen of Russia).
3. Country of citizenship. In some cases, it is a critical information for your service (e.g. when personal data of the user collected by the client-server system has to be physically processed in the country of citizenship as required by laws). The only way to determine it is to ask the user and require the honest answer from him by your Terms of Service. Note, that country of citizenship does not determine localization settings or user's current location.

[1] http://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-402/1.0/

[2] https://cordova.apache.org/docs/en/latest/reference/cordova-plugin-globalization/

Answer 2

I can think of a few options. The list is provided below and it is ordered by least effort needed and on the other hand how accurate will the information be.

1. Use user's locale string provided by Globalization plugin, it may contain the country code next to language code such as "en-US" or "en-GB".

Usage

function successCallback(obj) {
    var locale = obj.value;
}
navigator.globalization.getPreferredLanguage(successCallback, errorCallback);

2. Only for Android: Use plugin such as Device Information plugin which allows you to access the Android's Telephony Manager's information. From this information you are able to get the

Country ISO of your phone network provider

according to the plugin author. To use the plugin your code would look something like this

deviceInfo.get(function(result) {
    console.log("result = " + result); 
}, function() {
    console.log("error");
});

where the result will contain your netCountry called field as part of the string returned.

3. Figure the GPS to country conversion by yourself based on the country borders as GPS. One possible map (dataset) is available [here](World Borders Dataset). I would though recommend just using some external API to give that information for you.

Answer 3

If your app is only for phone or device with sim, you can use sim info plugin, https://github.com/dtmtec/cordova-plugin-carrier.

Answer 4

A simple solution is create a custom plugin and use Google geocoder, this code return location from latitude and longitude... This isn't for cordova, you need make some changes

try {
   Geocoder gcd = new Geocoder(this, Locale.getDefault());
   List<Address> addresses = gcd.getFromLocation(latitude, longitude, 1);
         if (addresses.size() > 0)
         String cityname = addresses.get(0).getLocality();
         String country = addresses.get(0).getCountryName();
} catch (IOException e) {
     e.printStackTrace();
}