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.
Discovered this bug on a flight this morning. A MOST unpleasant surprise. Like everyone else, I already upgraded. On all four of my Apple devices!
unfortunately, your warning message was too late for me.
I hope you will find a solution ASAP, and I’m waiting for it.
I’m a pilot using airnav pro for my weekly flights with external gps
Good luck. I’m crossing my fingers
Same problem with other brands of Bluetooth GPS.
GPS connects with Bluetooth’iDevices… But it seems it doesn’t link with navigation apps.
Upgraded my iPhone this week and have been hit with this bug, it appears to work intermittently and by that I mean work for a minute then drop out for a couple etc.
I suspect it is a time out issue as my iPhone now gets very hot when running Tom Tom, which is generally symptomatic of a looping process.
Currently trying to downgrade my phone
I was trying to figure out if the bad elf Bluetooth or internal GPS was feeding my wing x app. I noticed if I turn on airplane mode, with both Bluetooth and wifi off, it appears that the internal GPS is still active.
My understanding was that airplane mode disabled the internal GPS (if it was the cellular version) on all previous versions of iOS.
Is this a change, since I thought airplane mode use to disable the internal GPS? Is there another way to tell if the bad elf or internal GPS is being used in the wing x app? This could be why wing x still appears to work with my bad elf under 8.3, the internal GPS was still active.