iOS 8 geolocation warning shows even when no GPS watch active

[levic]

The new iOS 8 blue bar that says "SomeApp is Using Your Location" shows up even if location tracking is not running if it was running at some point in the background in the past.

Gist here: https://gist.github.com/levic/6a5d4b9c1b6ea1fcd147

Steps to replicate:

• Tap Start. GPS tracking starts.
• Tap Stop. GPS tracking stops.
• Tap Home Button. No warning bar displayed.
• Return to app
• Tap Start. GPS tracking starts.
• Tap Home Button. Blue iOS 8 location warning bar shows. This is expected as GPS is still running.
• Return to app
• Tap Stop. GPS tracking stops.
• Tap Home Button
• Blue iOS 8 location warning bar should not show, as there is no GPS tracking active. Instead, if at any time in the past the cordova app used the GPS in the background, the blue bar will always show until the app is terminated.

This occurs on iOS 8 if an app's location services setting is set to "While Using" (doesn't happen if is set to "Always").

Tested with

• Cordova 4.1.2
• de.appplant.cordova.plugin.background-mode 0.5.0 "BackgroundMode"
• org.apache.cordova.device 0.2.12 "Device"
• org.apache.cordova.geolocation 0.3.10 "Geolocation"

It seems possible that this could in fact be a bug with cordova geolocation itself assuming it won't ever run in the background, but there was nothing obvious in CDVLocation.m.

[levic]

Upon further investigation it has nothing to do with the geolocation module, but it simply the fact that the plugin uses a LocationManager as a way of keeping background mode running.

On iOS 8 then you should do:

window.plugin.backgroundMode.disable(); on device ready window.plugin.backgroundMode.enable(); before starting any geolocation watcher window.plugin.backgroundMode.disable(); after stopping any geolocation watcher

This should probably be mentioned in documentation.

[katzer]

the plug-in (master) does not use geolocation anymore