Location Services randomly dies

[3460169]

I have an M1 Max Mac Studio on 13.2.1 and seemingly since the install of 13.2.1, Location Services on this Mac is unstable. I originally made a thread here ( https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/location-services-borked-after-13-2-1-update.2380818/ ) but I'm not 100% sure it's purely a 13.2.1 thing so I'm wondering if others are seeing similar behavior on Ventura. I never did see this particular behavior on Monterey on this system or my M2 system that still has Monterey.

This Mac Studio is my everyday system. It is my primary system for my work-from-home job and it sees very little down or offline time. It'll go weeks or months between shutdowns or reboots (it does sleep though when not in use, of course). I do use a VPN client for work when needed and only when needed, and it's used to tunnel very specific network connections and not everything, e.g. no systems services whatsoever are tunneled. So I don't think the VPN is part of the Location Services woes here.

Essentially what happens is Locations Services ceases to function. I usually spot it first in the Weather widget because there won't be any data there. I'll then confirm it further in the Maps app (which can't find my location either) and in the Find My app. To "fix" the issue I merely log out and log back in -- no reboot is necessary.

Any thoughts or ideas on this would be appreciated. It's only happened a few times so it must be some rare edge case.

 

[Keikoh]

hey, the location services on my MacBook Air hasn't been very reliable after updating to the latest Ventura release as well. just like you described, one of symptoms is that the weather widget shows forecast failed and the weather app as well as maps are unable to detect the location. rebooting the system and manually turning the location services off and on will make it start working again. but one of the more efficient ways I figured out is you can just force restart the location services process through the activity monitor, this will do the same magic. the process name is locationd. if that's still too much of a hassle to you, try use this bash code to force restart the locationd process, I suggest you create a shortcut and put it on your menu bar so you can run it whenever the services dies.

#!/bin/bash
# Find the PID of locationd
pid=$(ps -ef | grep '[l]ocationd' | awk '{print $2}')
# Kill locationd with SIGTERM signal
kill $pid
# Wait for a few seconds for locationd to exit gracefully
sleep 3
# Check if locationd is still running
if ps -p $pid > /dev/null; then
# If so, kill it with SIGKILL signal
kill -9 $pid
fi
# Launch locationd again (it will run as a daemon)
/usr/libexec/locationd &

hope this will solve your issue, though this shouldn't be an issue in the first place.

 

[MarkVeldhuis]

To "fix" the issue I merely log out and log back in -- no reboot is necessary

On my MacBook Air M1, which has the same problem from time to time, putting it to sleep and waking it up again often fixes it too. Quicker than log out/back in again.

 

[Shazaam!]

M1 Max Mac Studio on Ventura 13.x, same issue. Shutdown or restart turns off location services. Turn back on using System Strings > Privacy& Security > Location Services. Apple must be aware by now.

 

[3460169]

hey, the location services on my MacBook Air hasn't been very reliable after updating to the latest Ventura release as well. just like you described, one of symptoms is that the weather widget shows forecast failed and the weather app as well as maps are unable to detect the location. rebooting the system and manually turning the location services off and on will make it start working again. but one of the more efficient ways I figured out is you can just force restart the location services process through the activity monitor, this will do the same magic. the process name is locationd. if that's still too much of a hassle to you, try use this bash code to force restart the locationd process, I suggest you create a shortcut and put it on your menu bar so you can run it whenever the services dies.

[script snipped]

Excellent find. I should've updated this thread long back to be honest. Since this thread I had installed Ventura on my M2 MacBook Air as well. It was a clean install done with Apple Configurator (same way I installed on my Studio) and it also had the Location Services woes.

In my continued research on the subject I also came across locationd and it was sufficient to issue a sudo killall locationd to restart it (its parent process is launchd and as with many daemons on macOS, launchd gratuitously restarts processes if they die, generally speaking). This will bounce both locationd and CoreLocationAgent, the latter of which here "manages the authorization prompts for apps, daemons and widgets that use location services." according to its very brief man page.

It's actually CoreLocationAgent that needs to be bounced, apparently. (Though bouncing locationd is fine too as noted above.) If you want to go the more formal route with launchd, the service name in question is "com.apple.CoreLocationAgent" so you can do:

snipped

com.apple.CoreLocationAgent service configuration states that it's started "on demand" so there isn't a strict need to manually start it.

I also haven't run into these issue again since the first few days after the initial clean installs of Ventura on both systems. ¯\(ツ)/¯

EDIT: WRONG. See below for update.

 

[3460169]

Still happening on 13.3 though.

And I have to amend my above post that the launchctl trick in fact does not suffice to fix this. The CoreLocationAgent will be stopped and then started again on demand the next time a location-aware app is used, but the situation remains the same: no location data.

Bouncing locationd works fine though.

sudo killall locationd

Or use the shell script from the second post above.


Gonna report this to Apple, again.

 

[Keikoh]

Yeah, it’s still there in the latest Ventura release.
I also noticed today that the Console app reported these fault and error messages when the location services crashed:

fault 16:20:45.880423+0900 locationd {"msg":"Not registering for location updates; desiredAccuracy is too high", "client":[root]\/System\/Library\/Frameworks\/CoreWLAN.framework"}

error 16:20:46.272595+0900 kernel Sandbox: locationd(346) deny(1) mach-lookup com.apple.PowerManagement.control

error 16:20:46.273499+0900 locationd IOPMAssertionCreateWithProperties: pm connection failed

fault 16:22:02.964370+0900 locationd {"msg":"Not registering for location updates; desiredAccuracy is too high", "client":"[root]\/System\/Library\/Frameworks\/CoreWLAN.framework"}

No sure if these would help

 

[3460169]

Just hit this again this morning on 13.3 Mac Studio. The workaround continues to be the likes of

sudo killall locationd

Curious how other people's experiences have been so far? Are you still seeing this issue? If so please be submit feedback via https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html or via Feedback Assistant.app (which you should find at /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications/Feedback Assistant.app)

 

[3460169]

This just cropped up again today. It's been a long minute since I've seen this one happen -- the usual telltale signs of the Weather app not having data for my location and Maps not knowing where I am.

I'd recently updated from Ventura 13.4 to 13.4.1 so I wonder if there is a regression here. Anyone else encounter this location issue recently? It is super sporadic. No rhyme or reason to it.

 

[3460169]

And again today. No pattern to it. I hit them with bug reports each time it happens. Hope they nip this one in the arse soon.