Background Location Updates Suspended

I have an app that is set to receive location updates in the background. This feature has worked for many versions of the iOS and for many years.


However under iOS 12 the operating system will suspend our app's location updates without any notification. applicationWillTerminate() is never called so there is no way to react to this happening.


Conversations with Developer Technical Support indicate they are aware of this issue and are working to resolve this. They say new to iOS 12 is a very aggressive function that will suspend an app's background location updates to "free resources." This happens in a completely unpredictable time and like I mentioned there is no notification to the app that the updates have been suspended.


Are others experiencing this? Have you been able to get any indication that this will be resolved soon.


We have requested at minimum that the OS notifies our app in some fashion that we can react and at minimum notify our users that this has happened and how to recover from this.

Replies

We are seeing this issue as well. Hopefully they will fix this soon, there is no way to detect it.

Hi

I have app which behaves in similar way and would like to confirm that this is the problem, I'm testing on iOS 12.3.1


Location updates stops being delivered to application in background after about a 20 minutes. Application is not closed because when I click on app icon it is brought back from background in state I left it and then updates starts comming again. I can also see that in top right corner of task bar there is little arrow, when it is displayed I got the updates, when it disappears I'm not receiving updates. I'm getting GPS data every 5 seconds, keep it in some queue and every minute I connect to my server via tcp socket and send these updates. When top right arrow disappears my app no longer connects to the server (and it should even with empty data) so I assume that app is in some suspend mode.


I have checked "Background Modes" (Location updates, Background fetch) in Capabilities. I have in plist file UIBackgroundModes fetch,location. I have also NSLocationWhenInUse NSLocationAlways and NSLocationAlwaysAndWhenInUse UsageDescription and App in system checking has settings->myapp->location->Always


Best,

Marek