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iOS5 Reminders - A Big Problem?

I have observed the same behavior has to OP in regards to location based reminders. Once you set up a list in the cloud you can add a location. When you add a location and the task is not complete, the location service arrow displays in the status bar. Until that reminder is complete the arrow remains active - even directly after a reboot. The second the task is marked complete the arrow disappears.

I agree it has to do this to make it useful, but I also agree if they can't fix the battery impact it will render the function useless to me.

I also concur with the OP in that just because you write code doesn't mean you become an os beta tester. You are running this to troubleshoot YOUR code, not necessarily Apple's. They have QA folks for that, if not they would run a more public beta.
 
how do you propose it know when you're in that location, when the gps isn't running? It can't know your there, then turn on the GPS to check, then remind you

the only way it can work is if the GPS is constantly running...if you don't want to kill the battery, set your reminders every morning, instead of 3 days early
 
dccorona said:
how do you propose it know when you're in that location, when the gps isn't running? It can't know your there, then turn on the GPS to check, then remind you

the only way it can work is if the GPS is constantly running...if you don't want to kill the battery, set your reminders every morning, instead of 3 days early
Click to expand...

Yes, no-ones denying that this is probably the only way it could work; it's just that with its current limitations it renders the feature a bit useless as I'm sure even I could remember something I had to do somewhere I was going in the next few hours. This would be potentially more useful if you think "I must remember to do XXX next time I go to YYY" when you might not go to YYY for days, weeks or months. Like "I must buy some weedkiller next time I go to the garden centre".
 
speaking of has anyone tried a loaction based reminder? i set one up today and it didnt work when i left my location or came back. maybe its not fully set up in beta 1?
 
I setup a reminder to "pickup glasses" with the location being the optometry office when I was heading over to the optometrists to grab my wife's contacts and glasses. I was about a block and way and it sent up an alert! Worked flawlessly for me!
 
dccorona said:
how do you propose it know when you're in that location, when the gps isn't running? It can't know your there, then turn on the GPS to check, then remind you

the only way it can work is if the GPS is constantly running...if you don't want to kill the battery, set your reminders every morning, instead of 3 days early
Click to expand...

Perhaps a better solution would be for the phone to only fire up location services on the day of the event, rather than telling users to "remember to set your remind the day you want reminding". Isn't that the purpose of the app, to set reminders and forget about them until you are reminded?

A perfect example would be the one that was made in the keynote... Call the wife when you leave the building and heading home.... If you know you want that reminder on a specific day because you will only be visiting that location on that day then why bother having the phone track all your movements before that day?
 
What people are mostly missing here is that 'Location Services' being on does not mean that the GPS is on.

GPS is just one tool that LS uses. It may not need to use it all that often to keep up with this kind of service.

So I dunno, I'd have to see more real-world examples to judge this, but I'm betting that Reminders don't drain nearly as much battery as people are afraid it will.
 
Small White Car said:
What people are mostly missing here is that 'Location Services' being on does not mean that the GPS is on.

GPS is just one tool that LS uses. It may not need to use it all that often to keep up with this kind of service.

So I dunno, I'd have to see more real-world examples to judge this, but I'm betting that Reminders don't drain nearly as much battery as people are afraid it will.
Click to expand...

I was thinking the same thing but there are two problems:
  1. Reminders need to know precisely where you are so it can tell when you move out of an area.
  2. I've witnessed excessive battery drain with the Reminders App. While at work I had a location Reminder set and after 6 hours of not being used, my battery was drained to 48%.
I compared the usage without a Reminder set and I do get much better battery life without it.

Also, they don't really work, when I leave and arrive in an area it fails to remind me.
 
Small White Car said:
What people are mostly missing here is that 'Location Services' being on does not mean that the GPS is on.

GPS is just one tool that LS uses. It may not need to use it all that often to keep up with this kind of service.

So I dunno, I'd have to see more real-world examples to judge this, but I'm betting that Reminders don't drain nearly as much battery as people are afraid it will.
Click to expand...

saying that i seem to remember in the iOS4 keynote last year it was said that the iPhone could use near by phone masts to trangulate its positon in some apps
 
I had a similar location based app on my Moto Droid. It could, based on location, day of week, time of day, etc., do any of a number of tasks including sending a text message. I believe the app, I can't remember it's name, checked your location every 15 minutes, perhaps to help with battery life. Problem was it would text my wife "Leaving work!" anywhere from 1 minute to 15 minutes after I left.

I would speculate that reduced batter life would in fact result in the use of such an app within iOS5.

I do agree with another poster that if you have a date and location the location service should not kick on till at least that date.
 
On further playing around with Reminders.app I've discovered a pretty severe bug that can leave Location Services running all the time with no apparent way to stop it (short of turning LS off, but it goes back to running when you turn it back on) - it even survives a hard reset.

I've filed a bug report and I'm not going to detail how to replicate/fix it here due to NDA, but if anyone finds themselves in this situation drop me a PM and I'll try to help you resolve it.
 
NightFox: I'm surprised it took folks so long to understand what you were talking about. I understood what you meant right away, as I found this thread doing a google search for the same thing.

Yes, I'm having the exact problem. ios5 was working great, then yesterday I set up a location based reminder. Now my location services icon is constantly on, and the battery drains extremely fast.

And for the snide comments of "well how would you expect it to work!". It's quite simple really: Since you probably don't need the reminder real-time, polling the GPS every 5 minutes or so for location would greatly reduce the consumption. For example, lets say it takes 1 sec. to turn on the GPS, 3 sec to obtain location, then another sec to fully take it down. That's 5 sec of power consumption, vs 300 sec. in a 5 min. period. So, that's 1/60th of the usage. Didn't take long to figure out, and didn't need to berate anyone in the process.

Doc
 
Doctauri: yes, that's a way. If I remember well, iPhone could also locate itself using wifi data connections and gps-cells: another way to reduce battery usage would be to use this two systems to have a first engage with the "zone" in which the reminder should occur. When user enters the zone, then iOS would switch on the more accurate GPS system.
 
Doctauri said:
And for the snide comments of "well how would you expect it to work!". It's quite simple really: Since you probably don't need the reminder real-time, polling the GPS every 5 minutes or so for location would greatly reduce the consumption. For example, lets say it takes 1 sec. to turn on the GPS, 3 sec to obtain location, then another sec to fully take it down. That's 5 sec of power consumption, vs 300 sec. in a 5 min. period. So, that's 1/60th of the usage. Didn't take long to figure out, and didn't need to berate anyone in the process.

Doc
Click to expand...

And you know Apple is too stupid to know just that, how?

IOS5 is in beta, and beta software always has a bug. If you find bug, report it to Apple. I don't see how things can be simpler than that. I thank the OP for creating this thread to let us know but the tone of it, like "OMG there's a bug! It's useless" eh? it's beta, nuff said.
At least the OP has come to his sense that he's under NDA.
 
NightFox said:
I've been playing with the Reminders app embedded in iOS5, and unless I'm missing something there's an issue which renders the interesting-sounding location-based reminders (where you can set a reminder based on when you arrive or leave a location rather than a certain time/date) practically useless.

As far as I can see, as soon as you create a location-triggered reminder, Location Services (i.e. A/GPS) is activated and remains permanently active until the task is either completed or deleted. Killing the Reminders app doesn't make any difference, as it always runs in the background as it's an iOS-level app.

In other words, if I set a reminder to buy milk and set it to trigger when I arrive at the supermarket in 3 days time, Location Services will be constantly running between now and then and there's no way I can stop it (except by disabling Location Services which defeats the object). Oh, except that after about 4-5 hours my battery is going to be dead with the massive battery drain caused by Location Services.

When you think about it, I'm not how sure this could ever work without Location Services being permanently active so I don't think this is a beta bug, but surely this makes what sounds a really useful function completely impractical to use?

*Edit*

Just to clarify, when I say Location Service is active, I don't mean just enabled I mean the GPS is actually running
Click to expand...

Pocket Informant has had a similar feature to location-based reminders working for months now based on APIs available in iOS 4. There was a lot of confusion with their users, too, over this. I can't say for sure how it works in iOS 5, but I am pretty sure it's the same.

The appearance of the Location Services icon does not mean that the GPS is active. It does not mean that your iPhone is actively finding its location by satellite.

The way PI works is that it gets notified whenever there is a significant location change -- e.g., a cell tower change. Then it does a brief GPS check to see if you're a certain distance away from where you set the alert to go off. So, if you're at the office all day and your iPhone never changes cell towers, then PI never activates the GPS to find where you are. No noticeable battery drain, even though the Location services icon is showing all the time.
 
matrix07 said:
And you know Apple is too stupid to know just that, how?

IOS5 is in beta, and beta software always has a bug. If you find bug, report it to Apple. I don't see how things can be simpler than that. I thank the OP for creating this thread to let us know but the tone of it, like "OMG there's a bug! It's useless" eh? it's beta, nuff said.
At least the OP has come to his sense that he's under NDA.
Click to expand...

I don't recall saying Apple was stupid. My comment was in reply to the snotty responses of, "well how did you expect it to work?!", implying that, having the GPS on full-time and huge battery drain was to be expected in an app that requires only periodic access to location data.
 
NightFox said:
Sorry, I wasn't too clear in my first post, I was talking about Location Services being 'on' AND ACTIVE. When you set a location-triggered reminder it is ACTIVE all the time.
Click to expand...

If your having a problem with that particular service, it is brand new and iOS5 is probably collecting all kinds of debug data. It may even be sending all of that data to Apple. It is only meant for devs and some statements about the beta sending data to Apple may be in the dev license. Just a guess.
 
I agree with the op this is a serious problem. Ever since installing iOS 5 beta battery life has been pretty sad. I noticed the little GPS indicator next to the battery this morning. Stumped, I restarted my phone then finally realized it was likely Reminders.app that was causing the problem. Just to give everyone an idea of the extent of this problem: I unplugged my phone at 10am, light web browsing, played a few songs from Pandora, it's now 12pm and battery is at 72%. This is my usual morning routine and I'm used to having around 90% remaining. I don't think this a bug, I think it's an oversight; either that or the iPhone 5 has a much lighter (in terms of battery consumption) GPS chip.

As of right now, I wouldn't put a lot of faith in Reminder's location based notifications (never seems to work for me), but the battery drain makes it virtually unusable.
 
JKColo22 said:
I agree with the op this is a serious problem. Ever since installing iOS 5 beta battery life has been pretty sad. I noticed the little GPS indicator next to the battery this morning. Stumped, I restarted my phone then finally realized it was likely Reminders.app that was causing the problem. Just to give everyone an idea of the extent of this problem: I unplugged my phone at 10am, light web browsing, played a few songs from Pandora, it's now 12pm and battery is at 72%. This is my usual morning routine and I'm used to having around 90% remaining. I don't think this a bug, I think it's an oversight; either that or the iPhone 5 has a much lighter (in terms of battery consumption) GPS chip.

As of right now, I wouldn't put a lot of faith in Reminder's location based notifications (never seems to work for me), but the battery drain makes it virtually unusable.
Click to expand...

If you have iCloud on, it's more that than anything. iCloud destroys battery life, your reminders probably won't give you any noticable drain.
 
jmack549 said:
If you have iCloud on, it's more that than anything. iCloud destroys battery life, your reminders probably won't give you any noticable drain.
Click to expand...


Open Maps, touch the gps icon and drive around for awhile and tell me battery drain isn't noticeable. Location based reminders does the same thing, just does so in the background. When you make a location based reminder in Reminder.app, GPS is definitely ALWAYS ON, waiting for you to "arrive at" or "depart from" the location you specified and seriously draining battery while it does so.
 
Last edited:
ryew101 said:
speaking of has anyone tried a loaction based reminder? i set one up today and it didnt work when i left my location or came back. maybe its not fully set up in beta 1?
Click to expand...

I haven't had much luck getting it to work either. Interestingly, Reminders.app seems unable to determine my "current location" beyond the city and zip code (Maps.app pinpoints the location). Is you experience similar?
 
JKColo22 said:
Your missing the point... If you make a location based reminder in Reminder.app, GPS is "always on."

Open Maps, touch the gps icon and drive around for awhile and tell me battery drain isn't noticeable. Location based reminders does the same thing, just does so in the background. When you make a location based reminder in Reminder.app, GPS is definitely ALWAYS ON, waiting for you to "arrive at" or "depart from" the location you specified and seriously draining battery while it does so.
Click to expand...

No, I'm not missing the point. I've used Google Latitude for over a year now, and it also always keeps the GPS on. It impacts your battery, but not as much as you're claiming.

However, when I first installed iOS 5 I noticed my battery was draining significantly faster. Turning off the syncing of the iCloud stuff cleared this up immediately.
 
jmack549 said:
No, I'm not missing the point. I've used Google Latitude for over a year now, and it also always keeps the GPS on. It impacts your battery, but not as much as you're claiming.

However, when I first installed iOS 5 I noticed my battery was draining significantly faster. Turning off the syncing of the iCloud stuff cleared this up immediately.
Click to expand...

That seems to be a bug... I had the same thing, and rebooting cleared it up without it coming back since. I haven't turned off iCloud though. There was definitely something eating 20-30% CPU in the background before the reboot, and it was in Apple's code.
 
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