HomeiDevBlogADayGeofencing: What do you do with it?

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Geofencing: What do you do with it? — 4 Comments

  1. I wrote an app to keep track of time at a location. I use it to track time to bill clients, and keep up with how often I go to the gym.

    http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/onsite-time-tracker/id470803110?mt=8

    Having supported the app for a while.. there are a few gotchas. It requires iOs5, but it doesn’t work on iPhone 3’s. You need an iPhone 4 or 4s. It also works much better with wifi enabled… because it’s largely using it’s crowd sourced database of wifi signals to determine your location instead of the gps, which drains your battery.

  2. Hello,

    Great post, but I was wondering what would be the difference in behaviour if in the info.plist it was missing “Required device capabilities”. Im developing a location app that runs in the background and besides some battery problems it did wake up the app while in background due to locations changes.
    Was it using the GPS instead of “Location Services” even though I didnt set any accuracy or distanceFilter?

    Thanks.

  3. The “Required Device Capabilities” setting lets you identify, for the App Store really, what minimum requirements your app needs to function properly. This is so people don’t (or can’t) download it if it won’t work on their device.

    So I guess strictly speaking, you don’t need it, but it’s the right thing to include if you are using location services, and it apparently imparts some wisdom to iOS about the kind of location information your app wants. If you use gps here, you are indicating both that the device needs to have GPS capability and that your app needs that kind of fine-grained accuracy. Using location-services however says that less accurate location information is OK (e.g. from WiFi and cellular network examination). In the end, its the GPS accuracy that comes at the cost of battery drain. It may very well be the case that if you do not include one of these settings, you get gps by default (if available).

    I believe that any accuracy or distance filter you set in your app has no bearing on what is reported to the app while it is in the background, which supports the idea that location-services yields less accurate information and gps yields more accurate information “automatically”.

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