I met David Jangminlien in Budapest yesterday, on April 23. I was done with my walk in the center of the city and was about to return to the airport. I was planning my route in the offline maps app on my smartphone when a guy approached me and asked for help. He had no access to internet and was looking for a way back to his hostel. Since the place was on my route to the airport, I walked the guy to a crossing he was familiar with. We had a short talk during which I advertized the offline maps app I was using. I explained that it now ran on my old backup phone, since I wanted to avoid the situation of the previous day in Milan when the main smartphone used both for navigation and taking shots ran low on battery. As GPS didn’t seem to work on the old phone, I used the app like a paper map, tracking my current position on my own.
We took a good-bye selfie beside the Carl Lutz Memorial but didn’t exchange contacts because of my absence on social networks. Today I found David using OSINT methods based on the few bits of information that I learned from him during our conversation.
After we parted, the GPS on my old phone revived. Probably it had worked before too, but as the GPS sensor may take long enough to initialize after a cold start I was not patient enough to see it working and started assuming that it never worked after I had flashed a custom ROM on my old phone.