Tracking location in background in iOS: standard location service vs. region monitoring

Question

I need my app to know user's position at all times, even in background. My app receives a set of regions of interest I need to check if user crosses. I don't know the size of those regions beforehand, so I need to listen for location updates with high accuracy. Then, I discard the use of the significant-change location service. Moreover, I need to call a service regularly for data updates even in background as well.

So, it seems that there still are two options:

1) enabling the background mode for location services and using the standard location service

2) region monitoring, which doesn`t seem to require enabling any background mode

However, I don't find information about the accuracy of region monitoring. My question is: taking into account that I have the coordinates of the regions I want to detect if the user is in, that I need high accuracy, and that I need to perform regular async services calls in background if location services are enabled (with a timer), what option should I choose?

Another thing: my app has to support iOS 5+

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

First of all, I would like to suggest you to drop iOS 5 from your support. If it is the customer's request, I would like to suggest you to convince them to drop this. See: The market Share for iOS. The market share for iOS 5 and below is less than 2%, the time spent to optimize for those devices are not worth it.

Personally, for the app that I developed in the last 6 months, I only support iOS 7 and above.

As for your question, you can choose both the options. They are not conflicting with each other. The app that I developed have location service in the background that sends the current location of the user to the server every minute and the same app also has region monitoring for crime zone. The user will receive notification when he/she enters the zone.

For how to keep the app active in the background, you may check this thread: Background Location Services not working in iOS 7

For Region monitoring, you may check this thread: Region Monitoring Glitch on iOS 7 - Multiple Notifications at the same time I posted a bit of code related to a glitch.