I'm a mobile developer working on an Android and iOS app that displays the user's location and various POIs on a map. I've been comparing the location objects that I get back from Android and iOS and I noticed that they both provide a property that represents the "direction that the device is traveling". Android refers to this value as a bearing and iOS refers to it as course.
Here's what the Android documentation says:
Bearing is the horizontal direction of travel of this device, and is not related to the device orientation. It is guaranteed to be in the range (0.0, 360.0] if the device has a bearing. If this location does not have a bearing then 0.0 is returned.
And from the iOS documentation:
Course is the direction in which the device is traveling, measured in degrees and relative to due north. A negative value indicates that the course information is invalid.
Given these definitions, it sounds like they are the same thing but I'm confused as to why they have been given different names. Is one term (bearing or course) "more correct" than the other or is this just a matter of Google choosing to call it one thing and Apple choosing something else?