I’ve fixed a bug that was having a fundamental impact on reliability. I mentioned this in my initial post about the release, and did some more digging. When the device is under resource pressure, the operating system can intervene and kill off apps. My understanding of the registering for location data isn’t a true background mode, and this is quite deliberate in order to minimise resource consumption. Assuming that the app is suspended, the operating system will make a decision on which apps to send the location data to via the appropriate delegate based on the registered mode in the plist file. At this point, the app will launch in the background, and you have a short amount of time to process. [I think it’s at this point that the OS can tidy up based on resource constraints.] Before hitting the location oriented delegate, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions is called, at which point you can check for a prior termination through:

if ([launchOptions objectForKey:UIApplicationLaunchOptionsLocationKey])


at which point I restart the location and region monitoring, based on a recommendation here. This does raise the question as to why you need to restart the location monitoring, given that the app is identified as wanting to receive location data in the plist. Having to register in code introduces volatility, which has to then ride through the various running  mode changes. Perhaps it’s to have convergent functionality [and readability] with doing the same in the foreground. Either way it works.

One other change in the AppDelegate is that I no longer use the same property based UILocalNotification. If more than one delegate is hit on restart, trying to use the same notification will cause an error.

I’ve also noticed a ‘feature’ in the GeoFence creation view controller. I thought it would be more elegant to automatically save the location data based on the pin drop event rather than a hard-wired button, as the map is already cluttered. One downside of this approach is that changing the radius of the region after the pin is down updates the screen but isn’t saved. It would be a relatively simple change to make but I’m toying with the idea of a podcast app [using some of the new background features].