This video of an iPhone 13 shows the Safari + “never” location services error condition and the solution we have implemented.

There appears to be a bug in Safari in the latest versions of iOS that, under very specific conditions, causes location services to get hung up in an indeterminate state. In this state it neither succeeds nor fails with its location data request, but instead just “hangs” with no result, showing the spinning “loading” image forever. This behavior is caused when the location services are turned on, but when Safari specifically has the location permissions set to “never”.  It also seems to only happen with a “fresh” start of Safari with a cleared cache.

As far as we can tell, this problem has not been documented anywhere online, and therefore there are no solutions published anywhere.

However, after many attempts we have successfully implemented our own workaround to detect and circumvent this issue. Please watch the video for details and test and confirm on your test devices.

This webcam video of an iPhone 13 shows locator behavior when geolocation services are turned off.

This behavior has been test extensively with location services turned off and on, as well as with user permission for location services either granted or denied.

If location services are not turned on, the locator will detect that location services are disabled, and it will default to the “home” location for your locator.

When a user taps the “search near me” geolocation buttons in the locator, the software will detect if the user has denied location data access and will instead search in the center of the current view.

This has been tested on the following devices on safari and chrome browsers:

iPhone 6, 8, 11, 12, 13

iPad Air 4, Air 2019, 6^th, 7^th, 8^th, iPad Pro 9.7, iPad Pro 11, iPad Pro 12.9