geolocation doesn't work with iOS 6 web apps!

Update: The above "workaround" requires removing

<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" /> or changing this setting to "no". Otherwise subsequent calls to navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition never invoke the callback.

It also requires calculating speed directly from observations.

Agree with all that this is a huge, awful, major bug. And another reminder that poor Apple just can't seem to get geolocation right these days. (In working on this, I keep linking to Apple maps and can't help but notice that somehow they have got the cul-de-sac running right through our neighbor's house...) (Sigh.)

I still hope apple will fix this, otherwise we are forced to consider Ios products not supported..

It shouldn't matter, but we have 100 000 - 500 000 page views a day.

The good news is: I've done it... I've figured it out. The bad news is: somebody smarter than me is going to have to tell you why this works, whereas any other variation of this solution or any of the other solutions offered don't work. This was a hard-fought victory but I'm too embarrassed to say how many hours (days) it took me to figure this out. Without further ado, here's a link to the solution. http://stackoverflow.com/a/14410106/818266

Well the fix did not work for me. Maybe I did not follow the instructions completely but I think I did and I did the initialization in the windows.load event so it was early (but maybe not early enough?).

One thing I noticed independantly of your code that I never really noticed before. After you call the

watchPosition

clearWatch

clearWatch

So there is still some pretty broken stuff in iOS 6.

Tested 6.1 and it seems that this problem has been fix in this release

Hmm, this is strange. 6.1 doesn't make any difference for me, at least not with my yet unmodified watchposition code which used to work on iOS 5.

@siasd: are you implying that watchPosition works properly for you in 6.1 ?

the issue remains in IOS6.1 😟

Its working fine for me. My app is back to iOS 5 days.

This is encouraging ... Are you using watchPosition or getPosition ? Are you willing to share the respective code fragment ?

watchPosition now works in iOS 6.1 as it did in iOS5

See for example http://vici.org/mobile.php

I tested your map and it only updates for a while. In your case, I think as soon as watchPosition has reached its timeout, then it throws a timeout error and stops. My understanding so far was that one has to explicitly call clearWatch to stop watchPosition from firing events. (in my app, I do this whenever I call watchPosition again).

I've experimented a bit with my code and tried to call watchPosition again as soon as the timeout happens, but this doesn't work reliably. Subsequent calls to watchPosition in a loaded page sometimes get valid positions, sometimes not (i.e. the accuracy is way off). At that point, I can only reset by killing Safari and loading the page again, just re-loading the page doesn't help.

Quite frustrating considering that this worked reliable on iOS5 😠

Ok, I now tried the approach with the timer controlled getCurrentPosition instead of watchPosition, same effect. Works for the first time, on subsequent calls (i.e. to refresh a changed position) it delivers results with a bad accuracy.

There is something else I observed, though: If I task switch to the builtin maps app in that situation, maps freezes for some seconds, then has a proper position. Switching back to the webapp, I can now retrieve a valid position again.

If I run an app like MotionX-GPS in the background and set it to not turn of the GPS at all when backgrounded, all is fine, I can update the position in the webapp as often as I want.

So it seems to me as if the JS calls somehow leave the GPS in a strange state or fail to "wake it up" - apparently native apps or a browser restart reinitialize it but repeated calls via the navigator.geolocation interface don't.

So as far as I'm concerned this interface is still broken unless you only call it once (or maybe a couple of times, eventually it will fail).

Message was edited by: XCTrails

I am using a modifed version that was described by

http://stackoverflow.com/a/14410106/818266

I did not try the version I had using the older pre iOS 6 code. Note this did not work for me before iOS 6.1.

I took the device out today for a test and at first every few minutes it did bounce around the true location by about 1/8 of a mile but then it seemed to settle down. I think it did this before iOS 6.

Well then, it seems I need to build a test app from scratch, maybe there are some side effects in my actual app. But the code for that app ran just fine on iOS5 and still does on other mobile OSes ...

But this comment in the above mentioned approach makes me wonder if this isn't some sort of twisted timing issue which popped up only in iOS 6 after all ...

"make this setTimeout delay one second longer than your watchPosition() timeout"