We have a pair of apps that are used to monitor the location of a person and allow them to reach out for help when needed. The apps are designed to be used with persons with special needs. A large portion of our target audience is people that have cognitive disabilities. One app is used by people that monitor and help the person with needs, and the other is used by the person with needs who is not with them all the time.
The issue we have is that our users have trouble understanding what to do when this verification popup appears. This popup continues to appear over and over and over. This is a severe health and safety issue for us. We find that the user is often times confused by the popup and is disabling the background location tracking preventing the needs provider from being able to track the location of the user.
It would be great if there was a special Entitlement that could be granted that would prevent this 'feature' of iOS. Or possibly simply a setting that the user's provider can setup on their phone to stop the annoying and dangerous constant popups.
If anybody knows of a way to prevent this popup, please let us know. Otherwise, if someone at Apple could suggest how we can make this happen in the future.
Currently there is no such entitlement that will disable the further verification popups. If you want the teams to take your specific use case into consideration, please file an enhancement request to this using the Feedback Assistant
The verification popup, as you call it, cannot be prevented if your app has obtained "Always" location authorization and is indeed receiving location data while in the background. The only way to prevent is to work with only When-in-use authorization if you are able to.
If you are using the high accuracy APIs like startUpdatingLocation() or liveUpdates() then using When-in-use is an option.
If you are using the low accuracy low energy APIs like significant location change, region and visit monitoring, then you do not have the option to not use Always authorization and the popups will occur. If the updates your app is receiving are in a steady state, the popups should not be appearing over and over and over like you say, unless this is an exaggeration for dramatic effect. But if due to your app logic or perhaps the user's actions the system is changing the rate of location updates for your app, so one day you get a few updates, but the next day you are getting hundreds, then the system will ask for verification earlier than it would normally have.
Also, consider that there could be other apps on the devices that are getting the same popup. So, even if you were able to optimize your app to minimize the frequency, other apps' popups might still be occurring and that could be what the users are seeing and getting stressed over.
Argun Tekant / DTS Engineer / Core Technologies
