Loosing ability to use or acquire GPS

I've got a couple of Android based tablets that I purchased specifically for use with Gaia GPS. All have GPS HW and support US GPS, US and Russian GPS or all four GPS systems.  I've noticed that Gaia GPS sometimes gets into a mode where it insists that GPS isn't available even though it works for other Android APPs that can use GPS.  I think I've narrowed it down to an issue in Gaia where when the APP gets updates it "forgets" how to use GPS and the only why to recover is to delete the APP and reinstall it.  Of course when I do that I loose all the offline maps that's I've spent days (sometimes a week or longer) to download.  Has anyone else observed the same behavior?