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
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TAGS: location services
