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.
Unfortunately the alert came just minutes too late for me as well. FlyQ is not receiving the GPS data from my Bad Elf Pro. Has anyone tried uninstalling IOS 8.3?
Yep. Put me on the list. iOS 8.3 broke communication between my Bad Elf Pro (purchased exactly one year ago) and ForeFlight on iPAD mini. I expected to get more than one year out of it before becoming marginalized and back shelved. I really, really, like this product when it works as advertised (supposed to work with ForeFlight). Please remedy and/or offer a discounted upgrade option.
Glad it wasn’t just me with “dumb pilot error” – I experienced the same thing with ForeFlight. iPad 4 WiFi only on iOS 8.3. Also used a Dual X150 and got the same results.
Any way to go back to 8.2 from 8.3 until this is fixed?
I saw the blog too late, BUT my bad elf gps pro ssn 117168 works fine with 8.3 andwith foreflight!!!!!
Not all gps pros must be affected?