Dear fellow developers,
I am trying hard to find a solution for my problem regarfing CLLocationManager.
I use a CLLocationManager instance in my Application. If the user selects the Home button on the device or terminates the application I want the location services to stop.
Therefor I call [self.locationManager stopUpdatingLocation]; - But this somehow doesn't work. The application enters the background and the small location arrow in the upper right corner of the status bar don't disappear. Even if I add [self.locationManager release] or self.locationManager.delegate = nil; - the location tracking don't stop :-/
It only disappears if I go to my device settings and switch off location services for the app. Whenever I switch back to location service enabled I immediately get a purple colored arrow next to the switch toggle and the icon reappears in the status bar.
My question is how can I turn off location services when the app enters the background or is terminated?
Thanks a lot in advance and have a nice day :-)
Your location is disabled. The location service icon "meaning" has changed on iOS 5. Take a look at this question: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/27463/why-is-the-location-services-icon-always-present
I Quote the answer:
It's a new feature in ios 5 called "region Monitoring"
The reason it's active even if the app is closed is that this feature
runs in iOS 5 core and notifies all apps that are registered when they
have entered or left a specific geo-fence.
Reminders does that when you use a location based reminder.
Although the location icon appears at all time. This actually has very
minimal impact on the battery due to apple really optimizing this
feature by using cell and wifi mostly.
Your app is working ok. The system behaviour is the one who changed.
You do it the right way. When entering background, it's ok if some delegate methods are called for some seconds. That should stop.
Where do you stop the location updates ? Are you sure it is triggered ? If yes, are your delegate method called even if the visual indicators tell something else ?
Are you sure you don't trigger a method that reactivate the location update after you have stopped it (because for example you can receive some updates even after stopped).
For instance if you started monitoring a significant location change, then you should unsubscribe from it with the corresponding pair method. If you are using region enter, then until you unsubscribe, the system will notify your delegates.
Related
In my app I'm updating user location every time when app becomes active. I stop CLLocationManager once updated location is received or in applicationWillResignActive:.
In Info.plist there is a NSLocationWhenInUseUsageDescription with appropriate description.
If app is activated and then immediately moved to background, blue banner saying that '%MyApp% is Using Your Location' appears for less then a second. This banner gets hidden as soon applicationWillResignActive: is called.
I've noticed the same problem in Google Maps, but not in Apple Maps.
Is there a way to get rid of this banner completely? Is there anything else I should do to make iOS happy? I do not want it to freak out my users and prevent them from using cool features that require location.
You have probably set location as Background mode in your info.plist. If you remove that, then the blue bar won't appear anymore.
Or, you can use requestAlwaysAuthorization instead of requestWhenInUseAuthorization on CLLocationManager (and provide the related NSLocationAlwaysUsageDescription in the info.plist file), and then it will not appear either.
In my case, my app is using location in the background in some cases, and I would like the blue bar to appear when that is the case. But I do not want it to appear when exiting the app without location in background. As far as I know that is not possible to achieve (I've asked about it here).
EDIT: Note that starting with iOS-9, you can make sure that the blue bar only appears when the user actually wants the app to use the location in the background. See this answer.
If you want to get access to the user's location with CLLocationManager, the app will need to show that banner and the user will need to press "Allow". If they don't do that, your location manager won't be able to detect the user's location.
Apple's Maps is a special case because it's a first party app.
The question "Background GPS in iOS. Is this possible?" does not answer this question.
I have a mapping app that uses MKMapView and its built-in location services when the app is active. When the app is in the background, I would still like location updates to be delivered and processed. For that, I'm using CLLocationManager.
I have location updates enabled in the plist file and call startUpdateLocation in the AppDelegate code which also acts as the delegate for CLLocationManager. This is everything mentioned in "Background GPS in iOS. Is this possible?",
When the app is active, everything works okay, getting updates no problem.
But when put in background mode, the little arrow indicating location services are being used comes on, but then disappears after about ten seconds. In this brief time period, the app seems to be able to receive location updates, but when the arrow is gone, no more updates.
Am I doing something wrong? Does MKMapView override what CLLocationManager wants to do?
Make sure "Background App Refresh" is enabled in your settings. You can check this programmatically by using backgroundRefreshStatus of UIApplication.
To receive location updates in the background, do the following:
Make sure to have a started CLLocationManager
Make sure to have the following value in your info.plist:
"Required background modes" = "App registers for location updates"
Avoid doing a lot of complicated things in your locationManager:didUpdateToLocation. In particular, avoid UI operations. Your execution time is limited by iOS, and not all APIs are available.
Everything is well documented, see "Getting Location Events in the Background" in the documentation.
Even though I called stopUpdatingLocation on my location manager, the location manager icon is still on the top right of my iPhone. Why hasn't it stopped?
There are several reasons why the location arrow on your phone may still be on even after calling stopUpdatingLocation.
For one, another app on your phone may currently be using your location.
Another possibility is that you enabled significant location change monitoring using the startMonitoringSignificantLocationChanges method but forgot to turn this off using the stopMonitoringSignificantLocationChanges method. Apps that are monitoring significant location changes will display a solid arrow in the status bar in the same way apps that are using standard location updates do.
Of course it's also possible that you are for whatever reason incorrectly calling stopUpdatingLocation and you actually are still getting location updates from a location manager. To check if this is happening wait several minutes after calling stopUpdatingLocation and go to Settings>Privacy>Location Services and find your app. If there is a solid purple arrow next to your app then your app is indeed currently using location services and something most likely went wrong when calling stopUpdatingLocation. However if there is a solid gray arrow, this just signifies that your app has recently used location services and it's likely that you did correctly stop getting updates. Another way to check if you correctly turned off location updates is by calling your CLLocationManager's location property and checking its timestamp property to make sure that it is not recent. If the timestamp is greater than the timestamp at which you called stopUpdatingLocation then you know something is wrong.
The icon you see at the top is not locationManager, is the location service of the device. If you deactivate in settings no longer appears.
I built this app which is tracking the users position even when running in background. I use the CLLocationManagers method
startUpdatingLocation
I set the CLLocationManager to
desiredAccuracy=kCLLocationAccuracyNearestTenMeters
distanceFilter=250
Everything works fine in foreground and in background. But when I don't move the device for a longer period (hours) I can see that the location arrow disappears. When I switch back to my app I can see that the arrow comes back immediately and that the app did NOT crash. Is this a "feature" of the LocationManager I don't know? Did the LocationManager went into some kind of "standby"? This should NOT be an issue with the app running not in foreground since I can travel with it for an hour and it gives me a perfect track.
Yes, this is a feature. As given in the documentation location manager object manages power aggressively by turning off hardware when it is not needed. Turning off GPS hardware can lead to significant power savings.
First of all I hope don't repeat any topic, I have spent a lot of time reading on internet about this before ask.
I'm developing an app for iOS => 5 and I need get the user location, but I don't need always a great accurate position, so when the app goes to background I change the normal location mode to Significant Location Changes and when the app come to foreground I stop the significant location change mode and get back the normal location mode, that's all goes fine,
my problem is when the app goes to background mode or even the user KILL the app the GPS signal (the purple arrow) still appear ALWAYS, even after restart the device, the only way to make disappear it is un-installing the or disabling the significant location changes when the app goes to background, but I need this mode working when the user goes to background mode, maybe not when the app is killed.
I don't know how to stop the service when the user kill the app... because event "applicationWillTerminate" is not called if you have multitask ON.
My main reason because I don't want the purple arrow appear always, even the app is killed is because I don't want the user think the app is drying the battery... so the user won't want the app installed.
First question: Is normal that the purple arrow appear always, even the app is killed if the Significant location change is enabled for the app?
Second question: Is any way to change this, to stop the service at least when the app is killed to hide the purple arrow?
Thank you all.
Sorry for my english if something is wrong.
After few days researching to be sure about this service, seems like there is NO way to use significant locations change in the background without the arrow in the top bar. I have been testing with different apps and reading through internet and nothing to solve this.
The only ""way to solve"" this is disable multitask mode in the app and disable the significant locations change in the event "applicationWillTerminate" but don't make sense... I'm losing the background location always not only when the app is killed... so is not useful.
It's bad... is a really good service to get locations saving battery but as user and developer I don't want an app that make appear this icon ALWAYS even after the app is killed, as developer I don't want that people uninstall the app for this reason and as normal user I don't know what mean this icon if is normal GPS or Significant locations change and what mean this... if my battery is being drain or not.
The other option to get locations in background task but has a big impact over the battery....
I hope apple fix this in future versions... adding at least a new arrow or showing only when a new location arrive instad of always or allowing to stooped when the app is killed.
All this has been researched over iOS - 6.1
Thanks to all.
When you use the significant location change service, the OS keeps your app running. If the app is in the background and is killed, the OS restarts it, so the purple arrow will always show. When a new location is detected, the app is restarted. From the docs:
If you leave this service running and your app is subsequently suspended or terminated, the service automatically wakes up your app when new location data arrives. At wake-up time, your app is put into the background and given a small amount of time to process the location data. ... To stop the significant change location service, call the stopMonitoringSignificantLocationChanges method.
Hmmm, interesting. I've just seen that problem with another app - seeing the arrow still active made me want to disable location updates for that app so the problem is real. Best thing I can think of is to have some kind of timer to disable the location monitoring after a certain amount of time if that is appropriate for your app.