Hi
iOS keeps stopping arc running in the background I have a iPhone 16 with the latest iOS running , can someone help
Hi @Fatdad!
The first things to check are that Arc has all the necessary permissions it needs:
- In the iOS Settings app, check Privacy & Security → Location Services → Arc Timeline, and make sure it’s set to “Always” and Precise Location is turned on.
- Again in the Settings app, check in General → Background App Refresh, and make sure that’s turned on both at the top and then specifically for Arc Timeline down in the list.
If those two were already correct, then I’ll give you a bit of general background on the problem before moving on to the next step.
Basically the problem is that iOS apps don’t have control over whether they stay alive in the background or not. They can ask to stay alive, but it’s up to iOS to decide whether it will grant that request and for how long. At any point in time iOS can decide it wants to kill off some background apps, to free up memory, to reduce energy use, etc. So there’s no absolute way of ensuring that Arc will definitely stay alive and running all the time.
In typical use you can expect Arc to stay alive for about a day at a time before it gets killed off by iOS. And then if all goes well it will be auto restarted by iOS before you notice the “Arc has been terminated” notification, and which point Arc will delete that notification so it isn’t there to tell you out of date info - it’s already running again.
But that leads us to the next step to take. Because iOS will eventually kill off Arc, and then also might not automatically restart it soon enough, there is always some risk of data gaps in your timeline. Which is why Arc has a companion app, Arc Timeline Recorder: Arc Timeline Recorder on the App Store
The purpose of that companion app is to sit quietly in the background, always alive, always consuming almost no energy or battery, ready to take over recording if Arc Timeline app is terminated. The two apps communicate, and decide which of them is going to be the active recorder at any point in time. Then if one of them disappears the other one sees that happen very soon after, and knows to take over the job, to prevent data gaps appearing in your timeline.
Though even then there’s still a risk of iOS killing off both apps! But in practice that’s rare enough that it doesn’t matter. And Arc Recorder is small and meek enough that iOS tends to ignore it and forget it’s there most of the time. So Arc Recorder getting killed off is super rare - it’s basically always there, quietly in standby, ready to jump in and save the day when needed.
Hi @matt,
I have this problem. But it’s because for six days I didn’t notice Arc Timelines stopped recording and the Timelines Recorder continued to record behind the scenes. when I finally noticed, ARC Timelines appears to have received the data from the Timelines recorder and been absolutely screaming since then with all the appearance of trying to crunch the six days of missed data.
For a while it was flashing “processing 4891…” or “ 5120 uncertain items” but it’s gradually curbed that down to thinking I was in a car for five days. It’s fine, I don’t really care because it appears as if all the data is there behind the scenes somewhere. It’s stopped trying to crunch all the data now, I think and given up.
But because the app has been trying to crunch all that data it’s at 38% battery usage by app in the Settings → Battery (>25> more than any other app) and now IOS is just killing the app because, my guess is, it’s the first on the list of things to kill because of the memory/battery use.
I’ll probably delete it and restore it which hopefully will take the target off it’s back, but I don’t want to risk losing the database by doing it. So I thought I’d ask you first.