Thoughts/questions re Shortcuts, Location Services, Location Based Alerts

iOS
1

Been playing for a while with some location based Shortcuts and couldn’t get them to work. No errors, should seemed to never fire. And I got an iBeacon to try with Pushcut. Pushcut can see the iBeacon. But again I could never get it to fire.

Then yesterday it dawned on me and I felt stupid. I had to enable Location-Based Alerts:
Settings->Privacy->Location Services->System Services->Location-Based Alerts

I’m normally VERY hesitant to give anything access to Location Services for privacy, and even more-so, battery life.

Just wondering if anyone else has run into this, or noticed a ton of battery usage? I see that the LS services icon is pretty much on all the time now.

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2

I share your concerns for the privacy angle of granting apps access to location services, but from a battery perspective, it hasn’t been a problem for me. I toyed around with it for location based automations and while they didn’t end up working for me, battery usage was never a concern. I seem to remember that Apple will leverage your cell signal instead of GPS for a lot of the background location based tracking so as to minimize how often it turns on the GPS radio. By doing so, the battery impact is typically insignificant, though it also depends on how aggressive certain apps are.

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