iPhone 6 Motion Calibration Always Using Location Services

thats's interesting! hmm..ok I shall try leaving it on for a period of time and see if anything comes of it 🙂 thanks for the info!

Hi, from the day of release i setup iphone 6 plus as a new device and started to notice that "Motion Calibration" GPS in use purple arrow sign is continuously using my GPS. This thread had just first 3 messages at that time.

I spent like an hour with apple support on the phone and advisor asked me to reset network and location services but nothing helped. Then he switched me to senior advisor and senior advisor after some wait time came back with response from engineering that its working as designed and M8 should use motion calibration etc.

Personally i didn't like this response and switched off the feature together with others like "Location based ads", "Frequent locations" etc.

I tested it from time to time I enabled "Motion calibration" back and got this purple sign continuously on - so not really sure if its a bug or feature but will keep it off.

Hi

I have the same problem with iPhone 6 like new, without old backup.

Motion calibration is always active and also location base alert is almost always active. 😟

I hope for a resolution of the problem in the next release.

I think you cannot always blame poor battery life on something like "Motion Calibration is always on". My phone has multiple location services active (purple) and my home screen always shows an active Location Services symbol. I use Google location tracking and other things such that it's always on. I get a full day of battery. And I restored to the 6 from an iPhone 5 backup.

You cannot assume that just because Location Services is active that the CPU is constantly running or GPS is constantly being accessed. iOS was enhanced back in iOS 7 (or was it 6?) so that it does NOT need to do this. It knows when you've made large changes in position, cell tower switches, etc. so that it is not constantly polling GPS.

Everyone is so quick to turn everything off, disabling useful features, thinking they know better than Apple. If you are having trouble it's best to follow the recommendations you get from technical support.

You might want to check this:

Settings > Privacy > Motion Activity

I use the Waze app, and it has requested to access motion activity. You may have others...

Hi all,

So I only just realized I have the same issue as well, not sure if it really matter form restoring (I did it from my 4) or network issue.

After reading all the replies, I went and look in the "Frequent Locations". It seems that ONLY when both Frequent Locations and Motion Calibration are off then the arrow up the top will disappear.

I guess enabling either Apple is constantly tracking "You iPhone's" location.

As motioned already, Motion Calibration is for 3rd party app (not sure what for yet), where Frequent Locations is using to improve Apple map (I think there's more to it).

Basically both aren't required to be on at the moment since it's only there to kill the battery and reads your location....might as well disable it for now.

This is one of the reasons I liked the iPhone over Android devices; I have better things to do than fret and tweak a phone all day. With all this customization, Apple is taking the iPhone into new territory and makes us all wonder what small thing we can do to make the devices run better, while really doing nothing at all but wasting time.

I think I know what motion calibration means!

It may be something to do with 'Frequent Locations' data getting corrupted (Settings | Privacy | Location Services | System Services | Frequent Locations)

I found that tapping on items in the History section would crash the Settings app.

Relaunching Settings and tapping on items in History would then work (you get a map showing all points). Once I was able to view the history items (thankfully only two in my case), the Location Services indicator in the status bar went away. So I left both Motion Calibration and Frequent Locations turned on.

After a few minutes (device went to sleep and I re-awoke it), I found that the Location Services indicator still off. Going into History items of Frequent Locations did not result in any crash of Settings app.

However, later on, I once again found Location Services indicator on. Going into History items then once again crashed Settings.

At this point, I'm going to turn off Frequent Locations (but still keep Motion Calibration on).

One thing I haven't tried was the "Clear History..." option in Frequent Locations. That should purge all history (and thus any corrupted data). But not sure if future created data would once again get corrupted.

As a developer, I'll also be filing this as a bug report. BTW, I'm using an iPhone 6 with iOS 8.0.2

Addendum: In exiting the Frequent Locations screen during my last test, it crashed the Settings app.

So I went into settings, turned off Frequent Locations, turned it back on, then went into History and cleared all history items. Finally, turned off Frequent Locations.

Went back into Frequent Locations and turned on. Tapping 'System Services' to return to the prior screen crashed Settings.

Thus, even without any history data, it appears that Request Locations, when turned on will crash Settings. And just a guess now, but the bad data/software is probably hanging Location Services when trying to access such data and your Location Services icon is always on.

So at this point, I have cleared my Frequent Locations history, turned off Frequent Locations, but still have Motion Calibration turned on.

Just checked this on my wife's iPhone 6 Plus (also with 8.0.2). While she didn't have the always-on Location Services indicator, going into Frequent Locations also crashed settings. So cleared its history and turned it off.

This fixed my issue, thanks.

This fixed my issue (Reset Of Location Settings), thanks.

Looking through each of the location settings it showed that "motion calibration" was constantly on, I subsequently waited for a few weeks to see if it would resolve itself, unfortunately not.. The root cause of this also seems to also be due to restoring from a iPhone 5S backup.

Go to Settings > Privacy > Motion Activity, see what applications you have turned on. For me it was the "Waze" app that was constantly calling the location. Even when it was closed. Toggled Waze off and now my Motion Calibration has stopped tracking. Hope this helps.

I did as jonfromhere suggested and found Runkeeper. Toggled Runkeeper of and the constant arrow is gone.