Is there a way to disable the blue location icon showing in the Dynamic Island with the new Arc Timeline app? Everything else seems to be working great, other than the blue icon staying visible all the time, even though the previous Arc app didn’t do that.
Is this expected behavior?
Hi @jersh!
Unfortunately yes this is expected behaviour.
This one’s been discussed a lot on the forum over the years. But the gist of it is that that opt-out in the old app was dangerous, and a risk to the app’s existence. It went great for some people (maybe most), but for others it could cause excessive battery use and frequent app termination leading to data gaps.
That then led to nasty 1 star App Store reviews, cancelled subscription, hateful emails, all sorts of not-fun things, some of which risked making the app’s business no longer viable.
So the new app uses Apple’s newest background location system, which doesn’t include that opt-out ability. The new background location system is much more reliable - no nasty battery use, no unexpected background terminations, no data gaps (or at least none from this).
To get that opt-out back it’ll have to come from Apple. But they’ve signalled a bunch of times over the years that they really don’t want anyone using it, and if you do use it you will be punished for it. So yeah, Apple big powerful company, me solo indie dev. Can’t fight it.
Not the answer any of us want! But yeah, it is what it is.
Totally understand – thanks for the thorough explanation! Do you know of a good way to still be able to see live activities on my phone with Arc Timeline running? I couldn’t seem to get the live activity to show on my dynamic island the last time I had one running. I tried swiping, tapping and holding, etc. to toggle between live activities, but I couldn’t get it figured out. Just wondered if I was missing something.
Thanks again!
I do encourage you (and everyone else who’s bothered by this, including myself) to let Apple know about it via Product Feedback - Apple .
Every few months or so, I would write them letting them know that I would still want the ability to toggle the indicator off for specific apps. I know from friends who use other always-on apps that use Location Data all the time that they’re equally as annoyed by this. Plus: It takes away the privacy thought behind it. Since it’s always shown, I can never know what app might be using my Location Data inappropriately.
Maybe, by iOS 30 or so, they’ll implement it, once they’re done with their various distractions they’re working on, currently.
Haha sounds great. Will do!
Strong agree on this! It defeats the privacy point, making it visual noise that we’re first irritated by and then eventually probably mentally filter out.
Yeah I also don’t have high hopes. This one has been around a bunch of years now, and they’ve seemingly not cared to make any changes at all. If anything they’ve doubled down over the years. But… we can hope.
@jersh For getting iOS to prioritise the one you want, I’ve found no solution at all.
Though we do have a loose plan… We’ve got a task filed (BIG-217) for creating a proper Live Activity for Arc. That would then (hopefully) replace the stock location indicator with the new Live Activity. Which we could then manage through… whatever APIs Apple offer for those purposes.
It might then be possible to for example specify that it should only ever take auxiliary/side position, never central position in the Dynamic Island. That would be a big win.
Though all still to be determined as to how much we can achieve there, within the limits of the Live Activities APIs. But… there is some hope.