23 September 2010

Undercover iPhone on iOS 4

We were close to releasing Undercover 2 for iPhone, featuring background location tracking on iOS 4. However, a few days after we started internal beta testing, Apple introduced iOS 4.1 and suddenly our internal Undercover builds stopped working. After some research, it turned out that iOS 4.1 contains a rather serious bug affecting background location tracking. Since Undercover 2 has been designed for background location tracking, there is no point in releasing this new version right now.

As soon as Apple fixes this issue - which we hope will be with the release of iOS 4.2 in November - we will submit Undercover 2 to the App Store. Although this situation is obviously beyond our control, we apologize to our iPhone customers. In the meantime, Undercover 1.6 should keep your iPhones and iPads secured.

Posted by Peter Schols @ 10:20 PM |

11 Comments:

At 02 October, 2010 00:39, Anonymous said...: That's truly a pity as I have been waiting for the update since background processing came out. Does Apple know about the issue?

Also, in your tests, how taxing was undercover on the battery in background mode?

Keep up the good work!
At 03 October, 2010 21:50, Peter Schols said...: Apple knows about the bug, and they will hopefully fix it for the 4.2 release.

In our tests, Undercover did not have any noticeable effect on battery life.

Peter
Orbicule
At 06 October, 2010 07:40, Anonymous said...: If I buy Undercover for the iphone now, will you offer a free upgrade to Undercover 2 when it is released?
At 06 October, 2010 10:01, Peter Schols said...: Yes, the upgrade will be free!
Best wishes,

Peter
Orbicule
At 03 December, 2010 00:42, Simo said...: How's it looking for Undercover 2 for iPhone now that iOS 4.2 is out, Peter?
At 03 December, 2010 11:29, Peter Schols said...: We will be releasing Undercover 2 for iOS 4.2 as soon as possible. We just want to make sure it runs perfectly on the new OS.
At 06 January, 2011 14:39, Anonymous said...: When do you think of releasing Undercover 2 for iOS?
At 06 January, 2011 17:24, Peter Schols said...: It's coming out really soon now, no later than the end of this month.

Peter
Orbicule
At 28 January, 2011 12:53, Anonymous said...: Hi Peter,

Can I you provide me the details when the update is coming out?
At 09 March, 2011 11:47, Simo said...: Hi Peter,

I hope the new secret Orbicule project is related to some sort of upgrade to Undercover for iPhone.

We've been waiting since the end of January for an update (as you mentioned above) without any joy...

Can't wait to hear about the new product!
At 09 March, 2011 14:49, Peter Schols said...: @Simo: the secret project is not related to Undercover iOS, but we are working on that one as well.

The reason for the Undercover iOS delay, is that there are several issues with Apple's location API. We have tested some of our competitors and in most cases they don't send locations in the background at all - in contrast with what they are saying on their websites - because of these issues. We don't want to release an app that only tracks locations in 30% of the cases, so we will need additional time (and probably a bugfix from Apple) before we can release Undercover 2.