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.
Thank you Edward Moore (April 12 blog post on this site). I went to the link you suggest and followed the instructions and am back in business!!! I had uploaded 8.3 one hour before I received notice from Firelight of the problem. Found it affected Avionics and Co-Pilot apps as well, the three big reasons I even have an IPad!!! Note that you have to backup and restore files and pictures from outside ITunes or ICloud as their backups will not restore to the downgraded iOS. And you end up having to load all your apps and set everything up on the IPad as though it were new. Took a few hours, but well worth it to have functionality until and if Apple gets its act together. (They insisted when I called them that there was no way to downgrade to 8.2—what’s with that?
Is there any update to this problem?
I too received this notification too late. What is the difference between the Bad Elf Pro and Pro+ that allows the Pro+ to work but the Pro not to work? I hope this has truly been escalated to be resolved within the week. Thanks for your attention and efforts to do so.
I upgraded to iOS 8.3 today’s morning ,I have a bmw 2006 , blue tooth stopped working on car phone ..connection is established with phone but no response in making calls or answering calls ,,if I get any tickets I will send the charge to Apple to pay them :)
Yep, I’m preparing for my IFR checkride and am just loving the devs at Apple, who have broken my georeferenced approach plates in ForeFlight with 8.3. I cannot believe I updated to a new iOS release—totally kicking myself. Very, very foolish.
Please provide any info ASAP on any response from Apple about 8.3.1 ETA to fix this total junk.