iPhone Pet Peeves: Why Does Every App & Its Brother Need to Know My Location?
Much as I love the iPhone and in particular iPhone apps, there are still some things that instantly and completely turn me off some apps.
One of these is the increasing (it seems to me) trend for apps that have no great or valid reason to know my current location to want to insist on having it, or apps that will only use my location if they are given it via Location Services, not allowing for me to enter it manually. There are a few reasons this winds me up severely.
I generally like running with Location Services turned off, to save battery life. I have no objection to toggling it on and off for an app that is genuinely going to do something useful with it “ Yelp or Earthcomber, which help find restaurants and points of interest near to you, are just two that spring to mind. But to have every single photo-sharing app, for example, demand to know my current location gets boring real fast “ I don ‘t travel much so geo-locating my pics is absolutely not a priority.
In my opinion, there just aren ‘t a huge percentage of apps yet that are really hugely useful in terms of their use of location-aware features “ and there are a far greater number of apps that seem to want to throw in location as almost a token feature. Fine if you want to do that, and have one extra feature on your App Store page “ but don ‘t then ram it down my throat and force me to use it, thanks very much.
Oh, and if you must know my location, let me enter it manually “ by city or zip code or whatever “ don ‘t strong-arm me and say I must turn on Location Services just so that your recipes app (or whatever) can know that I ‘m looking at recipes in Austin rather than Dallas right now.
The worst recent example of this I ‘ve seen “ the SportingNews Sports app. I liked reading The Sporting News years ago, and thought I ‘d give this one a look, even though it wasn ‘t published by the TSN folks themselves.
Bad call. This app flat-out will NOT launch if you do not turn Location Services on. Seriously. It just gives you the error message shown at the top of this post and either crashes to the home screen, or sits with the spinning wheel of fail continually spinning. It fails in this way on both the 2.2 firmware and the latest 3.0 beta.
Thing is, I could not possibly care less about this app knowing or using my location. I did not get it to look for local sports news. I have the AP ‘s MobileNews app for that, and I am much more interested in following national / international sports anyway.
Aside from the hugely annoying insistence on turning on the service rather than simply letting me enter a location, my main question is just how stupid is this anyway? You ‘re a freakin ‘ sports news app. Why make a huge assumption that I (or anyone else) is super concerned about adapting my sports news as my location changes. How does that even work? You ‘re a lifetime Oklahoma Sooner fan and now you happen to be driving through New Mexico, so you ‘re going to stop caring about OU and be desperate for New Mexico sports news. Not likely.
Blah “ app deleted, rant over. App developers “ please don ‘t try to force me to turn Location Services on, and please also don ‘t feel you need to prompt me for location info every time I blink if you really do nothing very interesting or useful with it
Apps often use location services as part of collection of metrics about the use of the app. 3rd parties such as Pinch Media provide libraries for collecting metrics and the default is that the location services are used. These metrics allow the developer to get feedback on how often their app is used, how long for, how long users spend in certain parts of the app code, and even the demographic of the users (via iTunes aggregated data)
Darren – thanks, I really hadn't thought about that – but I have to say my initial reaction is still no thanks. At the very least, this should be an opt-in sort of feature. If I don't want to participate in that type of data collection, and in fact it annoys the crap out of me to be pestered about it, it should be easy to turn off for good (no more prompt every time I launch app etc.).
If an app did this, or similar, on the desktop its life expectancy would be very short as well …
Noted. Patrick hates location services….
As Darren said – in some cases people are using it for good reason that you may not see. And while I agree that “Opt Out” should be an option, let's be honest most people are instantly going to opt out and not even look at what they're opting out of.
Pinch for example collects data from the app and then gives statistics based on that info. So … I know with gCalWall I have a decent number of users in Italy, but a much larger number in the States. If I was to start working on localization I know I need to focus on Italian first since they're the second largest user base.
If I did an “Opt Out” by default there's no way I'd know this aside from combing through sales reports that are terrible.
However, that said – you should be able to say no and not have the app shart all over itself.
My favorite apps are the ones where I am the one asking for my location–see GPS Kit and the like.
Yay for geocaching!
One word, Analytics
Guys – I'm not saying I want to keep my location secret from any apps. I'm very happy providing my location as long as it's in as sensible, non-intrusive (or huge PITA) way. I'd happily tick Yes to a checkbox in the App Store / iTunes that said something like 'You OK revealing your location on each iTunes purchase' – and then it would be done & dusted for me each time. Or providing it one time on first launch of each app. Or providing it manually for each app via the app's settings.
All those ways would be fine with me. I don't want to prevent Brandon from knowing I'm in Austin, not Italy. But … I don't want his app to ask me it *every* single time I launch it, while never giving me a way to set it once and forget it. And I definitely don't need apps telling me they *must* use Location Services to keep track of me when they have little or no purpose in doing so – I don't see how that one ties into analytics and such – unless you need to know that I bought your app in Austin, but I often travel to Fort Worth – not sure what great strategic / analytical benefit that brings …