Best practice to implement location based service in iOS

Question

What is the best (meaning least power consumption) way to use some location based service in an iOS application? E.g. checking the position in the background every x sec/min. I've read about geofencing, but I'm not familiar with it in detail (how often it is updating location etc.).

Thanks for sharing any ideas

Answer 1

There is no best practice, it depends much on your application, which location accuracy it needs. How fast you need a position change, etc.

Either you need to be accurate to under 30m then you need GPS, which uses Power (8h of recording is possible at best location quality without using the phone otherwise)

Or you need much less accuracy, typically 1km, then it works with Cell Tower or Wifi location, which uses less power.

In between there is nothing reliable. (e.g 100m accuracy with low power, does not really exist, at least I would not trust such a setting, there are no published measurements how accurate an iphone really is in the lower accuracy settings).