[MrAleGuy]

Last night I noticed the icon for Location Services activity was on my status bar constantly. The battery drain was pretty rapid. Investigating I found that Omnifocus was keeping Location Services active. Some of my contexts DO have an associated location. I can imagine this is related to the new geo-fencing ability in OF, but I cannot have the sort of rapid battery drain I observed.

I disabled OF's access to Location Services to confirm it was the culprit.

Before disabling: 10% battery drop in 20 minutes
After disabling: 4% battery drop overnight.

I'm using a 32GB iPhone 4 (AT&T) upgraded to iOS 5.

Can anybody else confirm this behavior before a bug report gets filed?

[Christian]

Having run a short test I did not notice a drain in battery power as fast as you described. In 5 minutes I lost about 1% (maybe even less) of battery life with wifi being enabled, OF being in the foreground and violet location symbol being displayed all the time. Provided, I did not press any "buttons" but that shouldn't make much of a difference.

One thing I noticed is that, when I turn the phone off (standby) and then turn it on again, the location symbol is gone from the status bar. Means its not constantly enabled when OF is not active on the screen. Now since you compared battery drain with location services on to them being off during the night I wonder: did you have the phone running and OF being on the screen during those 20 minutes that drained 10%? Did you change anything else? Display brightness comes to mind, or maybe bluetooth? Wifi on vs. wifi off?

I ask because your comparison does not really work and if you really lose that much battery then it might be another factor...

[mws]

I didn't notice the battery drain, but the location-service symbol in the status bar was on even when OmniFocus was closed. In the settings the symbol was colored in the OmniFocus line and even shutting down OmniFocus completely didn't change that. So I had to disable location-service for it.

iPhone 4S, iOS 5.0

All other tested Apps (Camera, Maps, ..) work as expected. Location gets active when the App is running and off when in the background.

[SFF]

This is happening to me as well. When opened, OmniFocus turns on Location Services, but does not release it when exiting or closing the app. Not sure if this is expected behavior (perhaps it's necessary for location-based tasks?), but I only noticed this happening after upgrading to iOS5.

[pjb]

http://www.omnigroup.com/blog/entry/..._in_omnifocus/

second to last paragraph

turn off location services in Settings until the update.

[Brian]

Sorry for the trouble, folks - Map view had a bug and wouldn't turn off location tracking when it closed. Folks that never opened that view wouldn't trigger the bug, but once you did open that screen, you had to force-quit the app to turn GPS back off.

OmniFocus for iPhone v1.12.1 is appearing on the App Store; it fixes this problem. Sorry for the inconvenience, everyone!

[jbernard703]

I don't know if it is user error or not but the location arrow is still staying on constantly. I've killed the app to make sure i wasn't suffering form the Maps bug and it still remains. Is it ever supposed to go off or is the GPS going to remain on 24 hours a day?

[derekr]

Originally Posted by jbernard703

I don't know if it is user error or not but the location arrow is still staying on constantly. I've killed the app to make sure i wasn't suffering form the Maps bug and it still remains. Is it ever supposed to go off or is the GPS going to remain on 24 hours a day?

Hey jbernard —*do you happen to be using our Location Reminders feature? (In that case, it will always be on.)

[Brian]

Welcome to the forums, jbernard703! If you've enabled the new Location Reminders feature in OmniFocus, in Apple's Reminders app, or a similarly location-based feature in one of your other apps, what you're seeing is normal.

I can't speak to the other apps on your device, but in OmniFocus, both the Map screen and the new Location Reminders feature will both cause that indicator to appear. What's happening behind the scenes in the two features is very different, however.

If you're only using Location Reminders, you'll probably see that indicator the vast majority of the time, and that's fine. You don't need to worry about battery drain. Map view had a bug which could hit your battery, but if you install 1.12.1, you don't need to worry about that any more.

I describe what's going on in a bit more detail as part of last Friday's blog post - I'd suggest that interested parties give that a read. Happy to answer more questions here, though!

[jbernard703]

I appreciate the response guys. I am using the location reminders feature. I suppose I am not use to seeing the location arrow on all the time and just assumed i would be taking a hit on my battery life. Great support as always and keep up the good work!

p.s. tell those Omnifocus for Mac guys to get to work i need version 2!!! :)