swift - Location Services not working in iOS 11

Question

I just rebuilt my app with the iOS 11 SDK in an attempt to remove the blue banner that is now always appearing. I thought - "Brilliant, that worked", only to discover that location services are now not working at all.

The application used to work with iOS 10 - Has anybody heard anything?

Answer 1

It would appear that apple have added yet another privacy feature. The user is now able to override our requestAlwaysAuthorization and downgrade it to requestWhenInUseAuthorization - Which means as a developer we now have to supply both descriptions in the Info.plist

I found that they have added a new key NSLocationAlwaysAndWhenInUseUsageDescription

/*
*      Either the NSLocationAlwaysAndWhenInUseUsageDescription key or both the
*      NSLocationAlwaysUsageDescription and NSLocationWhenInUseUsageDescription
*      keys must be specified in your Info.plist; otherwise, this method will do
*      nothing, as your app will be assumed not to support Always authorization.
*/

However, upon using this new key - the location service still didn't work, upon further searching I found this gem mixed in with all the extra debugging information:

This app has attempted to access privacy-sensitive data without a usage description. The app's Info.plist must contain both NSLocationAlwaysAndWhenInUseUsageDescription and NSLocationWhenInUseUsageDescription keys with string values explaining to the user how the app uses this data

Which directly contradicts the the comment that I found in the updated CLLocationManager.h file. So I've created a radar.

Good news, if you follow the advice of the debugging console, IE. add both the new key NSLocationAlwaysAndWhenInUseUsageDescription and one of the old keys NSLocationWhenInUseUsageDescription, locations services will start to work again.