System Services

[Fasthank]

Can someone tell me what system services does and can I turn them off without any major consequences

[Avatarshark]

What do you mean by system services? And I don't believe you can.

[snappyfool]

Think he means the location system services.

Don't know much about them but I have diagnostics, genius, iAds and traffic off. The rest seem useful so I left them on.

[Zcott]

You can probably turn them all off but I'd question why you'd want to do that.

[C DM]

Originally Posted by Zcott

You can probably turn them all off but I'd question why you'd want to do that.

Had them all off on a few phones for at least a year now without anything noticeable (aside from the fact that I don't randomly see something unexpected using location services as I occasionally had before disabling them).

[Fasthank]

Under location services there is system services 7 of then. I would like to know what they do and can I turn them off to save battery.

[Small White Car]

Originally Posted by Fasthank

Under location services there is system services 7 of then. I would like to know what they do and can I turn them off to save battery.

No, turning one or two of those off won't matter. Turning ALL location services off on the menu before that can make a difference, but if you have it on then that list is just showing you what has permission to access that data.

It doesn't gather the location data 7 times, it just does it once. Then, once it knows where you are, whether it shares that info with 7 or 6 things within the phone won't change your battery life.

[snappyfool]

Originally Posted by Small White Car

No, turning one or two of those off won't matter. Turning ALL location services off on the menu before that can make a difference, but if you have it on then that list is just showing you what has permission to access that data.

It doesn't gather the location data 7 times, it just does it once. Then, once it knows where you are, whether it shares that info with 7 or 6 things within the phone won't change your battery life.

Not true.

Go into airplane mode and the come out of it. Mobile Network Search and Setting Time Zone become active but Compass Calibration does not. I have all the others off but I suspect at least some of them, if enabled, would not become active in this situation either. So if I only had Compass Calibration enabled, battery would be saved in this scenario.

If I go into the Compass app, Compass Calibration becomes active and the other two do not. If I had Compass disabled and the other two on, battery would be saved here.

It's not all or nothing.


edit: Sorry, thinking about it more I could see that the icon might just indicate access to location data. But it seems to make sense to me that in these example scenarios - re-enabling the radios, going into the Compass application - that the system would try to get current and up to date location information by actively fetching it. And if the services requiring that information were disabled, it wouldn't bother. But if you have any more information about what you said that'd be great, cheers.

[Small White Car]

Originally Posted by snappyfool

edit: Sorry, thinking about it more I could see that the icon might just indicate access to location data.

I, like you, am guessing based on my very limited knowledge.

So while I can not say you are wrong, I will say that I'm continue to believe my own guesswork until someone with some kind of written, documented explanation could show me otherwise. Hard to say until then.

[C DM]

Originally Posted by Small White Car

No, turning one or two of those off won't matter. Turning ALL location services off on the menu before that can make a difference, but if you have it on then that list is just showing you what has permission to access that data.

It doesn't gather the location data 7 times, it just does it once. Then, once it knows where you are, whether it shares that info with 7 or 6 things within the phone won't change your battery life.

Well I've set all those system services to off an a few iPhone 4 phones in the family for about a couple of years now, and similarly had them off on a couple of iPhone 5 phones for a few months now--no adverse (or really any) effects of any kind.