Location always on? [Location reminders run in low-power mode.]
 

Previously whenever I used Omnifocus, the location icon in the iphone will be left on but fill. From what I remember, that means that the location is being checked on the background at regular intervals and it uses less battery.

But since one or two updates ago, it seems to be used all the time (arrow completely filled in blue) and started noticing the battery started lasting less, is it just me? or was the behavior changed?

That's due to a change in iOS. We use "significant location change" notifications, which are low-power, but that location arrow change is unfortunately leading some people to believe that we're polling the location (which would indeed use more battery). I'm not on that team, but my understanding is that we're trying to make some changes that will alleviate this.

I have similar situation as well. It was showing the right icon that indicating the use of geo-fencing detection. But recently it shows the filled-icon that referring to the full geo type location.

My phone's battery last half-day unless I cut off the location service for Omnifocus.

Anything I can do to help troubleshooting?

I can confirm that I also get the filled out purple location services icon instead of the outlined one and that leaving it on consumes quite an amount of battery power.

It used to be different for me as well.
(iPhone 4, iOS 5.1)

I realize that tis is anedoctal, but my iPhone 4S seems to be drawing power more than usual lately. The purple location arrow remains even after "killing" the OmniFocus iPhone app. Running iOS 5.01.

Me here as well. On a normal workday I got 5-15 location reminders, and I'm not even touching the iPhone!

Extremely annoying, just turned the reminders off.

I was looking for an app that uses location-based alerts, found OmniFocus for iPhone and spent $20 to realize that it uses location polling. Extremely disappointing! PLEASE fix it ASAP!

You can get a refund within 30 days of purchase. Contact the Omni support group for help with that.

I'm curious how you know that it is using location polling, when the Omni engineer says it uses a different mechanism, and that an iOS change makes it appear as if it is using location polling? Which iPhone version and iOS version do you have?

That engineer said he's not in that team and taking into account the fact that Reminders.app and some others still use previous mechanism I suppose it is actually polling.

It's a small company with a collaborative culture, and the iOS geofencing support is something new. I would expect that even if Andrew hadn't personally coded it, he's in frequent contact with the engineer who did so, and in my experience, it's hard to shut up an engineer who has a shiny new gadget to play with :-)