Alert: Compatibility Issue with Apple iOS 8.3 and External GPS Receivers
DO NOT UPGRADE YOUR APPLE DEVICE TO iOS 8.3 IF YOU RELY ON AN EXTERNAL GPS RECEIVER.
We are investigating reports that iOS 8.3 (released by Apple earlier this week) is not feeding GPS data from most external GPS receivers into 3rd party apps, such as ForeFlight, WingX, JeppFD, Navionics, and others. We have reproduced this issue in our lab and confirmed that this issue is not unique to Bad Elf GPS receivers, but affects other GPS receivers from Garmin and Dual Electronics as well.
Our newer GPS accessories, including the Bad Elf GPS for Lightning (BE-GPS-1008), Bad Elf GPS Pro+ (BE-GPS-2300), and Bad Elf GNSS Surveyor (BE-GPS-3300) do not seem to be negatively impacted.
We are working with Apple to resolve this issue and will provide status updates as we get more information. In the meantime, we recommend you wait to upgrade your Apple devices to iOS 8.3.
Update (Monday 13-April): We've passed all of the necessary information to Apple Support and got confirmation over the weekend that it has been passed to the correct team. We're optimistic it will be fixed in the next iOS 8.3.x release, and will post updates as we receive them.
Update (Thursday 16-April): We're still awaiting any news from Apple. In the meantime, we’re exploring several possible workarounds. We have confirmed that the beta iOS 8.4 released earlier this week has the same GPS issue. Some customers have reported successfully downgrading their iOS back to iOS 8.2, but we can’t recommend that process to our customers — it’s not supported by Apple and requires a complete wipe of your settings/apps/data. If you are a pilot grounded by this issue, please contact us via email to support@bad-elf.com and we’ll see what we can do to help. Rest assured we are doing everything in our power to get this resolved and will send another email when we have any new information.
For future updates on the iOS 8.3 situation, please view the latest information on our supplemental blog post, available here.
I went to Sun n Fun with the intentions of purchasing a Bad Elf. However, today is the last day and your product still doesn’t seem to work. It doesn’t make sense to purchase a product Until the issues are resolved.
So, I’m heading home without it.
I hope Apple is covering your losses for interfering with your product sales.
Really Bad Elf? No fix for this yet? Was just reading Garmin Glo got on top of this whole 8.3 issue by releasing a firmware update to their product.
There is a similar thread running on the Garmin website and I think that we are all saying the same thing. I fly with a Garmin GLO and Skydemon but also carry a bad Elf plug in (lightning connection) as a backup. Fortunately, the Bad Elf plug in works fine, so my flying is not affected. It was money well spent and far better than messing about with my iPad settings. All that I would say, however, is that, if some of the later GPS units are still working wiith IOS8.3, then surely this is as much an issue for Garmin and Bad Elf; if they can produce units that DO work with IOS8.3, then why can they not provide a software update for earlier units that mimic these later units? Unless they do so, I fear that we could be waiting a long time for Apple to provide a fix, but I live in hope.
I highly recommend to downgrade to iOS 8.2. After upgrading to iOS 8.3 i read the article about the issue. Tried to connect my gps pro but didn’t work.
As Apples window for downgrading is still open it as easy as upgrading. Do it as it is described in Edward moore’s post. See link.
I downgraded to iOS 8.2 and everything works fine again.
Hope this helps some people.
Happy landings
Still no fix?!?!? This is crazy. I’m a CFII and use foreflight for teaching instrument flying quite a bit. I upgraded my subscription the day before the update, and then it became useless… talk about feeling like throwing money down the drain. My Bad Elf has always been great and worked fantastic, and i know its not their issue, its mainly apple’s, but its been almost 2 weeks and still no fix?!?! Pretty frustrating.