com.samsung.android.location Copy

A Samsung platform component that devices report under the terse label "slocation". Samsung ships it as a standard part of Galaxy firmware: it is listed as "slocation", package com.samsung.android.location, in Samsung's own Knox Common Criteria mode application lists, which inventory the software preinstalled on a certified model. Samsung publishes no description of what it does, and does not expand the name, so this note does not guess at what the leading "s" stands for. What this site's own record adds is a narrow and revealing permission set. It is preinstalled and Samsung-signed with certificates that also sign the framework, it has no launcher entry in our sample, and it declares only four permissions: ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION and ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION, plus two Samsung-defined permissions, com.samsung.android.mcfserver.permission. START_SERVICE and com.samsung.android.mcfserver.permission.USE_PROVIDER_API. So it is a location-consuming component that also talks to another Samsung service through a provider API. Beyond that the specifics are undocumented: what it does with location, whether it supplies location to other components or only consumes it, and what the MCF server is, are not published by Samsung and are not asserted here. Note in particular that this is a Samsung component and is not the same thing as the Knox SDK's location policy classes, which are a management API for administrators rather than this package. Version note: the component has been carried across many Android releases and has been actively developed. Samsung's Common Criteria lists record version 1.0.34 on the Galaxy S7 LTE (Android 8), 1.2.76 on the Galaxy S20+ 5G (Android 10) and 1.5.32.101 on the Galaxy S21+ 5G (Android 11), while this database's sample runs from 1.6.49.116 to 2.2.73 with target SDKs from 30 to 36. The step to a 2.x line inside our own sample is the one visible signal that something changed, but Samsung publishes no changelog, so what changed and in which release could not be sourced. No observation in our sample is marked Play-eligible, so on the devices we have seen it ships and updates with firmware. For Android Enterprise, EMM and kiosk fleets, the relevant question is privacy governance rather than manageability: we found no source identifying this package as an enrolment, policy or compliance dependency, but it does hold fine location. The supported levers are the platform ones, that is Android's location controls and runtime location permission, applied through your EMM, rather than acting on this package directly. Because Samsung does not document what depends on it, disabling a privileged location component could plausibly affect other Samsung features that expect it to be present, so treat removal as a change to test on one device before rolling out, not a routine debloat step.

• Galaxy S21+ 5G (SM-G996B, Android 11) Common Criteria mode application list - Samsung Knox Documentation →
• Galaxy S20+ 5G (SM-G986U1, Android 10) Common Criteria mode application list - Samsung Knox Documentation →
• Galaxy S7 LTE (SM-G930R4, Android 8) Common Criteria mode application list - Samsung Knox Documentation →
• Package provenance for com.samsung.android.location - Android System App Database →

• Signed by the device maker's own signing key (Samsung), so it is an OEM preinstall, but 2 different certificates appear across the fleet, so OEMs ship their own builds of it. It also signs the Android framework, so it is a platform-level key on its device(s). Inferred from the certificate appearing only on Samsung devices (508 packages, 10196 observations).
• Its largest observed manifest declares 4 permissions: 2 runtime (user-granted) and 2 vendor or uncatalogued.
• Never reported as user-facing, so it runs as a background or system component rather than an app the user opens.