App Developers Claim Apple's iOS 13 Location Tracking Changes Are Anti-Competitive

[zedbran]

As a developer, the repeated "App using background location" prompts are ludicrous.

Say my app sends emergency alerts. Life or death stuff.

Every time an alert gets sent to a user, the alert's relevance is decided based on the user's current location.

If the user is in Denver, and a Tornado is touching down in Texas, the use likely doesn't want that alert. It's irrelevant. The only way to determine this relevance is by pinging the user's location and comparing it to the alert location.

If the app didn't do this, the user would get every alert nationwide and become annoyed.

This results in quite a few pings. All 100% honest. None stored.

Now, Apple shows user this ping history.

User has no idea the app is doing all this important work behind the scenes to prevent bombarding the user with alerts. They just see all these pings and panic.

What's worse? The app itself stores none of the location history in this instance, it discards all of it. Guess who stores the pings?

APPLE to show the history!

The one claiming to be the good guy, meanwhile putting your actual location data at risk by logging it.

So user sees "Only allow while using app", and naturally clicks it.

A major storm strikes, and the user isn't alerted because the alert cannot function without background location enabled.

What does user conclude? "This app spied on me (false), kept showing permission popups (Apple), then didn't work when it was supposed to (misled user by Apple). If I could give it less than 0 stars I would."

 

[dwaite]

As a developer, the repeated "App using background location" prompts are ludicrous.

Considering these prompts are only triggered once per app, and only when the app has both requested background location access and has used it repeatedly, I would disagree.

As a user, the only alternative to me would be that all apps (or at least all which are not primarily mapping apps) have to have background location tracking enabled manually within the privacy settings.

If you envision another alternative, I'd be interested to hear it - but my understanding is that a single prompt and button press for permanent background location access is gone now, forever.

Every time an alert gets sent to a user, the alert's relevance is decided based on the user's current location.

If the user is in Denver, and a Tornado is touching down in Texas, the use likely doesn't want that alert. It's irrelevant. The only way to determine this relevance is by pinging the user's location and comparing it to the alert location.

If the app didn't do this, the user would get every alert nationwide and become annoyed.

This results in quite a few pings. All 100% honest. None stored.

Sounds like a nice feature. I'm sure you realize you don't need dynamic location. You can:

• Ask the user for a ZIP code, with a button to instead use the phone location
• Have appropriate text telling the user location is used to update your location to get alerts relevant to you, and is not used for any other purpose or stored by the server
• For the alert when you have used location in the background, make sure your provided text is terse and appropriate to explain to the user the benefits of allowing continued location access
• When location is disabled (either for background use or in general), use the last known/configured location.
• For alerts, have a rich notification that has a button that basically says 'not relevant to me' that lets them tweak the kinds of notifications given, as well as the location.
• Update your UI when dynamic location updates are disabled, with a link to go to the app's privacy page to re-enable location.

By the way - I am somewhat surprised you can send all storm alerts nationally and not hit a push notification cap. I would have imagined you would have to associate at least a broad region with the device for filtering pushes.

User has no idea the app is doing all this important work behind the scenes to prevent bombarding the user with alerts. They just see all these pings and panic.

Thats why you can provide app text.

What's worse? The app itself stores none of the location history in this instance, it discards all of it. Guess who stores the pings?

APPLE to show the history!

Sure, Apple stores location information local to the device - they have done this for many releases. Among other things, this is used to power Siri suggestions.

The one claiming to be the good guy, meanwhile putting your actual location data at risk by logging it.

So user sees "Only allow while using app", and naturally clicks it.

A major storm strikes, and the user isn't alerted because the alert cannot function without background location enabled.

What does user conclude? "This app spied on me (false), kept showing permission popups (Apple), then didn't work when it was supposed to (misled user by Apple). If I could give it less than 0 stars I would."

Obviously the alert function can work without background location enabled, but it works in a reduced capacity (in that it doesn't automatically update for a user when they move or as they are traveling)

 

[bb9]

I understand what app developers are getting at here, but honestly, users who aren't savvy enough to go into the Privacy settings and change the option to "Always Allow" when necessary are the exact people who probably shouldn't be continually tracked by an app.

excellent logic. 👏👏
[automerge]1571376590[/automerge]
“This makes consumers more aware of apps that are tracking them continually, but it is an extra step that app developers must contend with.”

I say good for Apple. 👏👏

 

[Mutepointer]

As a developer, the repeated "App using background location" prompts are ludicrous.

Say my app sends emergency alerts. Life or death stuff.

Every time an alert gets sent to a user, the alert's relevance is decided based on the user's current location.

If the user is in Denver, and a Tornado is touching down in Texas, the use likely doesn't want that alert. It's irrelevant. The only way to determine this relevance is by pinging the user's location and comparing it to the alert location.

If the app didn't do this, the user would get every alert nationwide and become annoyed.

This results in quite a few pings. All 100% honest. None stored.

Now, Apple shows user this ping history.

User has no idea the app is doing all this important work behind the scenes to prevent bombarding the user with alerts. They just see all these pings and panic.

What's worse? The app itself stores none of the location history in this instance, it discards all of it. Guess who stores the pings?

APPLE to show the history!

The one claiming to be the good guy, meanwhile putting your actual location data at risk by logging it.

So user sees "Only allow while using app", and naturally clicks it.

A major storm strikes, and the user isn't alerted because the alert cannot function without background location enabled.

What does user conclude? "This app spied on me (false), kept showing permission popups (Apple), then didn't work when it was supposed to (misled user by Apple). If I could give it less than 0 stars I would."

While it’s understandable, privacy policy is more important than geo location tracking.