GPS tries to cover the whole globe, app uses GPS to get location. Ship probably has internet connection in the from of wifi or a cell tower with a starlink or other sattelite backbone link and app's traffic is encrypted so ships firewalls cannot easily block this
Back in PHP days you had an incentive to care about performance, because it's your servers that are overloaded. With frontend there's no such issue, because it's not your hardware that is being loaded