Due to an issue with the way angular handles dom changes, there is an interesting problem when attempting to send a position object from an angular service using a deferred promise. If you treated the geolocation API as an asynchronous function—which it is in practice—and used the $q service to return a deferred promise from an angular service, nothing will happen when you enact the .then() method in your controller.

If one were to use the geolocation functions within a controller, and is not intending to use the callback directly to handle the returned information – which in my opinion is the right way to do it – one must use the $apply method, which is a method within the $scope service, to let angular know that the information has actually been retrieved from the API.

However, since you can not use $scope within a service, you must use $rootScope instead, then use $apply from that.

e.g.

   navigator.geolocation.getCurrentLocation(
        function(position) {
            $rootScope.$apply(function(){
                deferred.resolve(position);
            });
        }
    );