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How to Add NSLocationAlwaysUsageDescription Key to Info.plist File in Your iOS Appby@kapilgorve
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7,574 reads

How to Add NSLocationAlwaysUsageDescription Key to Info.plist File in Your iOS App

by Kapil GorveDecember 22nd, 2020
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React Native has a GeoLocation service which gets included by default into your build. Even if you do not use the GeoLocation API in your codebase, it is still in your app build. This triggers code bots about possible usage of Geolocation. You need to add a custom message about why you need user's location data as well. You can see on the left Libraries in current app in below screenshot. This solved the NSLocationAlwaysUsageDescription issue. I deleted RCTGeolocation.xcodeproj from libraries folder in XCode.

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We received a message from iOS App Team about adding

NSLocationAlwaysUsageDescription
 key in 
Info.plist
 file. Our last build was rejected for this specific reason.

Being clueless about what went wrong here. I googled up and found some interesting things.

NSLocationAlwaysUsageDescription
 key needs to be added to your 
Info.plist
 file if your app using user's location data.

You need to add a custom message about why you need user's location data as well. Quite surprised by this, we were not using geolocation service or tracking user's location. Our app didn't need this specific functionality. So why do we need to tell the user that we are tracking the user location while we are not?

Turns out React Native has a GeoLocation service which gets included by default into your build. Even if you do not use the GeoLocation API in your codebase, it is still in your app build. This triggers code bots about possible usage of Geolocation.

How do you solve this?

Referring to this github issue — https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/20879, there are three possible ways to fix this.

I tried the first and easy one and that worked fine for me. I deleted RCTGeolocation.xcodeproj from libraries folder in XCode and rebuilt the app.

You can see on the left Libraries in current app in below screenshot. This solved the NSLocationAlwaysUsageDescription issue.

Previously published at https://www.jskap.com/blog/Info.plist-file-should-contain-a-NSLocationAlwaysUsageDescription/