Ben Collier

A great, but under­used loc­a­tion fea­ture on iOS is the pur­pose prop­erty of the CLLocationManager.

So many apps ask for your loc­a­tion — give your users con­fid­ence in shar­ing their loc­a­tion by telling them why you need it!

Example:

 
locationManager.purpose = @"We'll only use your location to show you local events nearby.";
 

You need to do this before you start the loc­a­tion mon­it­or­ing, so:

 
CLLocationManager *locationManager = [[CLLocationManager alloc] init];
locationManager.purpose = @"We'll only use your location to show you local events nearby.";
locationManager.delegate = self;
[locationManager startUpdatingLocation];
 

Your users will now get a pleas­ant reason when you request their per­mis­sion:

I’ve no idea why this is so rarely used, it’s been avail­able since iOS 3.2.

Tip from the Apple docs:

You must set the value of this prop­erty prior to start­ing any loc­a­tion ser­vices. Because the string is ulti­mately dis­played to the user, you should always load it from a loc­al­ized strings file.