Passbook Event Ticket Relevancy Issues

While experimenting with PassKit I found some weird behavior which I believe might be a bug, or two.

Passes can have a date and locations where they are relevant.  For event tickets – according to the documentation – the locations are optional. You expect to see passes to appear on the iOS lock screen from some time before the event until it starts.

I spent 2 days testing this and thought I was losing my mind, until I found this thread on the Apple developer forums. Apparently iOS 7 has a bug where passes don’t appear on the lock screen if you have Passbook enabled in the location privacy settings.

I went even further back and tested with 2 passes, one with location info, one without. To the best of my knowledge the location information was the correct one for my location. I recorded the result on this video:

In the video you see me adding first a pass with location information and then one without location to both an iPhone 4 (iOS 6.1.3) and an iPhone 5S (iOS 7.0.4). For the one with location info I needed to disable the location on both iOS 6 and 7 for the pass to show up. For the one without location info this disabling was only necessary for iOS 7. It showed up fine on iOS 6.

I don’t understand how iOS deals with the location updates, maybe my problem there was that the pass does not show up if you are already at the location of the event. I have location services enabled for everything, including WiFi and this reports a location in the console log that is very close to the location in the pass.

So, in summary, I believe that there are two issues:

1. Events with location should be showing up on the lock screen – but they don’t on iOS 6 or 7. Bug?
2. Events without location should be showing up – but they do so only on iOS 6. iOS 7 bug.

I did as a good iOS developer should do and filed this Radar as rdar://15834152 and on OpenRadar.

Does anybody know how iOS handles relevant locations? Why would it be necessary to disable Passbook in location privacy for even tickets even back in iOS 6?

Event Passes with Relevance Information do not appear on lock screen

Summary

PassKit passes that have relevance info should be appearing on the lock screen, but I have been unable to produce any pkpass files that show up on lock screen.

Steps to Reproduce

1. create a pkpass that is an eventTicket and has only the relevantDate info set for a short time into the future
2. send the pkpass to yourself and add it to your iPhone’s Passbook

Expected Results

If you lock the device and unlock it, the pass should be visible there

Actual Results

No passes appear on the lock screen

Version

7.0.4 (11B554a)

Configuration

iOS 7

Categories: Bug Reports