Q: location based reminders don't work in ios7 ?

On the "siri shouldn't confirm reminders if they won't actually happen", I agree with you, this is a bug.  Siri should either complain in this case, or silently re-enable whatever you disabled.  I filed this through a developer channel.

I can tell you why this happened, though.  People have complained over the years that non-system apps (think like what OmniFocus is to Reminders, or what Google Maps is to Maps) don't have the same level of "built-in-ness" that the system apps do.  The result of this feedback is that Apple has made more system-level privileges available to third-party apps so that they can have more feature parity with system apps.  Rightly or wrongly, the decision was made to let the user edit some of these permissions (like Background App Refresh) because perhaps you don't want to use Reminders, or you want to use OmniFocus instead.  Meanwhile Siri is just inserting reminders into a database without a lot of awareness of whether it's OmniFocus or Reminders that will ultimately process them, or whether they're running or have the right permissions.  That's how we got here.

On the multitasker behavior, this is debatable.  Specifically, there is a dispute about what this multitasker is good for.

• Does it exist primarily to let you switch between applications?
• Does it exist primarily to show you apps that are running and allow you to quit them?

Arguably, people use it as both, and arguably there is a lot of overlap between these two things.  But there are sometimes where these ideas don't overlap, and so you have to make a judgment call about whether to design it for one case or othe other.

I think when you are in that situation (where you must do one at the expense of the other), you should favor the displaying and quitting of running apps.  This is because:

• There are other ways to switch between applications, like arranging them on your home screen and tapping their icon or using Siri.  There's no other way to quit apps.
• If your goal is to scan and find some application to launch, these other interfaces are way better and more productive.  The multitasker is really only good for switching to an app in the five or so that you've recently used.  It doesn't order them consistently; there's no muscle-memory; you have to make a lot of gestures to even view the app you're looking for, etc.  It's just not a good interface for looking for apps you used several days ago.
• Having a lot of apps in the list doesn't really matter for the task switching case, because we've already established that you're only using the first five.  The fact that Reminders appears way over to the right in the list doesn't really impact the usability of the task switching behavior, so it does you no harm to leave it open.  The only reason that Reminders would appear near the front of the list is if you opened it recently, and in that case it's even more logical to display it in the list.

So for those reasons, I think that the multitasker behaves better in iOS 7 than it did in 6.  It's really only good for switching between a few recent apps, so there's no harm in letting the list grow quite long.

Finally, I would say something similar to what I said earlier about the Background Refresh feature.  There is some desire here to let the user use third-party apps for reminders.  What you call a "critical system service" is another person's "how do I turn this off?" 

I can't tell you how many thousands of complaints I've gotten that "Reminders works in the background... why can't your app?"  And I have to explain that it's because Reminders (and Maps, and Phone, and ...) all have Secret Voodoo Powers that no third-party developer can do.  In iOS 7, we've taken a step towards leveling the playing field and making first-party and third-party apps behave more similarly. 

For example, people in this thread have learned for the first time that quitting Reminders stops it from working.  Maybe now they will learn that quitting the apps that I write stops those apps from working too instead of expecting them to magically continue to work.  Being consistent about stuff like that for first-party and third-party apps sets much more realistic expectations about what third-party apps can and can't do.  If users quit Reminders and it still works, then they start expecting that same behavior for OmniFocus and Evernote and Things and they try all of them and leave a string of 1-star reviews in their wake complaining that none of these apps behave like Reminders does.

@CubaCalian & @compaqdrew: Thank you for your explanations and subsequent responses on this issue.  Both point out important aspects of the new multitasking regime in iOS 7.

Two points, however:

1. Open or closed, Reminders will issue time-based alerts, but will only (sometimes) provide location-based alerts when open.

2. If it can provide time-based alerts when closed, it still has some "Voodoo" powers (I like that a lot), just not as many as it used to.

I think at the end of the day, the biggest complaint boils down to 1) Sometimes, even when open, Reminders won't give location-based alerts (all permissions correct and enabled) and 2) All iOS system apps get full-time access to time-based alerts whether they are open or closed, and 3) There are many location-based services running full-time, and if an alert is added, Reminders should be automatically included in that "special voodoo powers" list (then automatically removed when the alerts are fulfilled).

1. Open or closed, Reminders will issue time-based alerts, but will only (sometimes) provide location-based alerts when open.

My experience:

1. Location-based reminders have been ifallible for me for months now. There was an update that may have fixed something, or I had to delete and reset the reminder after upgrading to iOS 7. Can't remember exactly.

2. This is true even after switching to a new iPhone 5. So either Reminders did work when not in the multitasking bar, or restoring from backup activated all apps that were active on the previous iPhone 5.

I did what it says here.. I reset the privacy and location then I keep reminders open in the multitask and have my background refresh set to on for my reminders.  It works for the most part but ONLY when I unlock my phone, then the reminders pop up. It will not remind me unless my phone is unlocked.  Is anyone else finding this?

My conern is that even if the apps (Reminders, Find Friends) are working as Apple intend them to, they aren't working as the vast majority of users (or at least those I've read on here and spoken to) expect them to. That either means Apple needs to amend how they work accordingly or provide definitive, clearly explained information as to how and when the apps work and what we can/can't do with them. Especially if that has changed from previously (iOS6 especially).

There is simply no excuse for turning on Find Friends, setting a reminder to tell you when somebody else leaves a location, having it not remind you and then having to troubleshoot to figure out why. Don't force me to jump through hoops in order to get an app to work. If the reminder won't work unless the other person has the app open and switched on, then tell me that and I won't expect it to work. My experience is that it will tell me the location of other users even if they don't have the app open, which confuses me all the more (because I would not expect it to be reporting the location of the phone to the Apple servers in that case).

Here's another anomaly that leaves things unclear, at least as far as I am concerned. When I have Reminders open in the background, the location icon is active but outlined in the taskbar. When I have reminders closed but Find Friends open in the background instead, the location icon is colored white in the taskbar and appears momentarily before disappearing approximately ten seconds later (even if the app is still running in the background). I have absolutely no idea what that is and maybe I've missed an explanation from Apple as to why.

> There is simply no excuse for turning on Find Friends, setting a reminder to tell you when somebody else leaves a location, having it not remind you and then having to troubleshoot to figure out why.

Yeah there is an excuse: you deliberately and explicitly told it not to remind you.  Either by deliberately and explicitly turning off Background Refresh.  Or by deliberately and explicitly killing the app.  In either case, the user took an action to opt out of receiving these reminders.

Could it be clearer?  Possibly.  For example one could put big giant "you don't want to do this" confirm dialogs whenever the user disables Background Refresh or kills an app.  But those are annoying, and everybody just presses "yes" anyway, so I'm not sure the situation would be materially improved.

> When I have Reminders open in the background, the location icon is active but outlined in the taskbar. When I have reminders closed but Find Friends open in the background instead, the location icon is colored white in the taskbar and appears momentarily before disappearing approximately ten seconds later (even if the app is still running in the background). I have absolutely no idea what that is

The short answer is that there are various different technologies involved in determining your location.  This information matters to developers and some power users playing games with iOS system settings and so they have slightly different apearances in the status bar (filled in vs not filled in for example).  From a user perspective the important thing is that a triangle in the status bar (whether filled in or not) means some app is using your location data.  Different apps in different circumstances need different kinds of location data and so the change in what is drawn there has to do with what kind of location data Reminders or Find Friends has requested from the system.

I appreciate the reply and the explanation. To clarify, Find Friends was running in the background the entire time. Notification and Background App Refresh were also both enabled. For the record, this is on an almost brand new iPhone 5S running the latest versions of the app and the latest version of iOS7.

The entire time I was waiting for the app to trigger the alert, I was able to track the location of the other device perfectly. I gave it sufficient time and when I re-checked the location of the device the app hadn't updated in the background and the location hadn't updated since I last checked. Regardless, given that when it did update the location it had at this stage left the geofenced zone it should still have triggered the alert and still didn't.

Other accounts (and there are plenty of them) that I have read online are reporting intermittent alerts or extremely delayed alerts which also imply that there isn't an issue with the settings (otherwise it would either never issue a notification at all).

It works for the most part but ONLY when I unlock my phone, then the reminders pop up. It will not remind me unless my phone is unlocked.  Is anyone else finding this?

My iPhone 5 rings the location-based reminder whether the screen is locked or not.

it could be that i have the same Problem.

I know the Reminder for locations work since ios 7 on my iphone 5 but dont know how long.

now i can see that it doesnt work how it should work.

when i create a new Task to remind me on a location i should have the geofencing symbol in the bar but i dont have it.

my options for the reminder app are all enabled and the app is in background or open and i dont have the geofencing symbol, this is not normal.

How can i fix it? GPS work fine and i know gps is not geofencing.

Seems like apple is fixing the problem with 7.1

http://www.idownloadblog.com/2014/02/11/ios-7-1-fix-geolocation-issue/

Note that the issue mentioned is that if a user force quits an app, er, it quits. As a previous poster mentioned, it's reasonable to assume that's what the user wanted. Here's a quote from the concerned developers:

In previous versions of iOS, if a user killed an application in the app switcher, developers were still able to get geolocation in the background.

Also note the Cody Lee's comment:

I’ll be honest here, I’m not sure I want this behavior to change.

His concern seems to be battery usage. With this change, force quitting an app may not prevent it from continuing to drain your battery.

But there's also a potential privacy concern, or at least a user-choice concern. If force-quitting an app doesn't really force quit it, how are users to stop an app from getting geoloction information? How are users to force quit an app that's malfunctioning? Do we need to wait until we can delete the app from iTunes and our iPhones? Restart the iPhone?

Hopefully theres an option in settings that will allow us to choose which apps we want to be able to run in the background even after we kill it in the app switcher..

they fixed the reminders app geofencing problem on 7.1.. u no longer need to have it running on the background in order to get a location based reminder... APPLE HEARD US!!!! lol..

I updated to 7.1 this morning. I had a reminder set for when I left my house. Didn't work.

I haven't had a problem yet.. I have made about 8 location based reminders with siri and just by me entering some manually and haven't had any issues..( knock on wood lol).. And thats with out the app running in the multitasking section..