requestWhenInUseAuthorization never shows dialog on watchos

Question

Created Sep ’23

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I have a combined iOS + WatchOS app that has worked fine on iOS 16 and WatchOS 9, but on iOS17 / WatchOS 10 I have location permission issues.

As you can tell from the previous sentence, all plist entries are set and asking for location updates when the app is in foreground worked fine on the watch on WatchOS 9, however since switching to Xcode 15 things have stopped working.

What happens now is:

I call locationManager.requestWhenInUseAuthorization() on the watch, which doesn't do anything. I do not get the popup asking for location permissions and none of the delegate methods are called on locationManager.

However as soon as I do the same call on my iOS app I get the popup on my phone and immediately the delegate is called in my watch app. So right now the only way of getting location permissions from the user is inside the iOS app, not the watch app.

Has anyone else encountered this? Is there a solution?

Boost

Answer 1

Engineer OP

Apple

Sep ’23

This is a known issue, and it is going to be fixed in a future update to iOS/watchOS

The good news is, this occurs mostly for developers who may be constantly installing, deleting, updating, perhaps pairing/unpairing, etc. during development and testing, and we don't expect actual users to be effected. Currently the only way to solve this is a location services reset, which we are not recommending unless these are strictly development devices you don't care losing state on, or you are desperately stuck and can't wait for a fix.

1

Answer 2

rsebbe OP

Oct ’23

good to know there's some awareness of the problem. See also https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/736785 Can we get an ETA of the update / expected OS version number that solves it? We've been stuck in that problem for over 7 weeks & counting, and people on that thread report that it also affects users with App Store & TF builds. It also appears to affect Apple's own apps, and as such is a major issue for all location-based companion watch apps.

If you could please give us additional information about the release so that we can plan our development efforts accordingly.

Thank you for your help.

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