ios 8 app shortcut in lock screen

Question

There have been reports that an app shortcut appears in the left lower corner on the lock screen in iOS 8 if the phone is close to an iBeacon transmitter (it may also me triggered by location). I've even seen this work (somewhat unreliably) in previous iOS8 beta releases with my own app, compiled with the iOS 7 SDK. I didn't do anything special for this.

Now I'm trying to get this to work with iOS 8 GM seed but I just can't get the shortcut to appear, no matter what I try. I have not found any new API calls to support this feature.

Is there anything new I need to do? Do I need to ask for requestAlwaysAuthorization, or is requestWhenInUseAuthorization sufficient? Do I need to be ranging or monitoring?

Answer 1

The icon appears in iOS 8 whenever CoreLocation has triggered an app to enter the background as a result of monitoring for CLRegion enter/exit events. This applies to both beacons and geofences.

You do not need to do anything special to get the icon to appear. But you do need to set up region monitoring properly, and you need to be patient. Background monitoring events are not instantaneous. If you do not see the icon, that indicates an enter/exit region event has not yet fired.