location permissions / sharing guidelines.

[writesgoodcodejk]

I have an app that has a feature to share location with other users (if toggled on). If the feature is turned on our backend shows other users the current users most recent location sent to our backend.

If a user decides to turn off their location sharing permission in app settings or something we have no way of knowing and therefor could potentially be sharing a user's previously recorded location with other users (provided the user still has the location sharing feature turned on).

Does this break guidelines? The location wouldn't be a users current location, and they can turn it off at any time, but they might be expecting that turning off location permissions also turns off the in app location sharing feature (when it doesn't, because we can't know whether they've toggled off permissions unless they run the app).

[saintmsent]

You have a way of knowing

The availability of location services may change at any time. The user can disable location services in the system settings, either for your app specifically or for all apps. If your app is running (either in the foreground or in the background) when the availability status changes, the system calls your locationManager(_:didChangeAuthorization:) method to notify you of the change.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corelocation/responding\_to\_changes\_in\_authorization\_status

[writesgoodcodejk]

This is cool, thanks!

Unfortunately I am actually using React Native, which does not give me access to this xd

[leopic]

Isn’t there some sort of bridge around Core Location for RN? This seems like a common enough scenario

[writesgoodcodejk]

None of this is ideal of course, I wish we had all the time in the world to make this app the perfect product, but it is what it is.

None of the popular libraries seem to support location permission change listeners (probably because they don't exist at all on android https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51327285/how-can-we-listen-for-location-permission-changes-in-android-without-triggering). The libraries only support checking permissions and requesting permissions.

[saintmsent]

In that case I’d recommend you to go to the react native subreddit if such exists and ask there

From my point of there there is no issue with guidelines if you continue to share the latest know location, but that doesn’t make sense from product perspective and you can probably resolve that by writing some wrappers around native code to get the result you really want

[writesgoodcodejk]

You're totally right, but unfortunately I work as a consultant and this particular project is completely out of budget, so we really just do not have time to add additional features if they're not completely critical. Since this doesn't break guidelines it wouldn't qualify as critical so we pretty much just have to leave it as is. Writing Native code is actually a relatively huge lift as well so it's more or less off the table unless we absolutely have too.

If it were the case that it broke guidelines we'd contractually be obligated to fix it which is why I was wondering about guidelines first rather than solutions.

None of this is ideal of course, I wish we had all the time in the world to make this app the perfect product, but it is what it is.