iOS 15 Bug Affecting Geofences and Beacons

Apple’s latest phone operating system, iOS 15, has been out for several weeks. A few days after its release, we began receiving reports from customers indicating Geofences and Beacons were not always updating statuses automatically. We started experiencing the same issue around our office and immediately began investigating.

It became clear early on that this was likely a bug in iOS itself. Our assumptions were bolstered by other apps suffering from similar issues. We escalated our bug reports to Apple themselves and have sent them gigabytes of diagnostic data proving the problem. We now have word from Apple that this is officially a known issue.

Unfortunately, this means there’s not much we at Simple In/Out can do to improve Geofences/Beacons until Apple resolves their bug. We have noticed that the more you launch the Simple In/Out app on your phone, the more Geofences/Beacons tend to work as expected. When the Simple In/Out app is in memory, we likely avoid whatever bug is inside iOS 15 that is causing troubles.

We will continue to work directly with Apple and update our customers on their progress. In the meantime, we recommend launching the Simple In/Out app on your phone once a day if you use Geofences or Beacons. We also recommend having the latest version of iOS 15 (currently 15.0.2) in the hopes that Apple solves its problem before we’re officially notified.

We apologize that Apple’s bug is causing Simple In/Out to work unreliably in the background. We hope Apple can fix this bug quickly for our customers and everyone.