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.