Phones handle that this way, but it's not necessarily a good thing if that's the only way they can get the ephemeris data. I used to navigate in Japanese cities using not my phone, but my tablet. Worked fine. Then I changed to another tablet. Didn't work at all, could not. The only time I could get a GPS lock was if I could connect to a local wi-fi, which is not something easily done. Its GPS software clearly didn't even try to get the ephemeris date via the GPS signal, it relied 100% on network download. Which made it utterly useless, in the place where I needed it most - another country, non-EU at that, and my tablet doesn't even have a SIM slot, and if it did, I would have had to buy/get a SIM card (as would I for a phone, something I normally wouldn't need).

In short - downloading ephemeris data from the internet is fine, but if it also cripples the whole thing by not using the embedded GPS ephemeris data.. horrible.