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Hollow arrow Find My always on

deuxani

deuxani

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 2, 2010
711
744
After the update to iOS 15 I noticed the hollow GPS arrow of death in the top left hand corner and it won’t go away. After further inspection the Find My iPhone option seems to be the culprit.

1A2E92B0-3095-48F1-B6A2-659E39CFDDDA.png


I didn’t have this on prior iOS’s and it’s also not showing on my iPad, just on my iPhone. After 12 hours it’s still there.

I tried rebooting, turning off Find My Network and Send Last Location, but the hollow arrow stays.

The reason it’s annoying is that it gets higher priority over the focus mode icon, so if it’s always showing the hollow arrow I will never see which focus mode I’m using.

I’ve turned off the arrow for system services for now, but I obviously want that turned on to see when GPS is being used.
 
I got exactly the same issue.

Its annoying and can’t fix it, had to turn it off temporarily until we get a solution.
 
OK, so it‘s not just me then. That’s at least good to know 😉
 
Did you wear an Apple Watch at the time when you have noticed that behaviour? I get that whenever I wear my watch.
 
Shadow2k said:
Did you wear an Apple Watch at the time when you have noticed that behaviour? I get that whenever I wear my watch.
Click to expand...
And you always will since you will get that “Phone Left Behind” alert on the watch if you leave your phone somewhere. That will override any Focus setting. When I go out for my daily exercise walk I only take my watch and I get that notification when I get a distance away from home even though starting an activity/workout holds other notifications by the Focus feature. And I like it that way, lets me know the feature is working. The hollow location arrow can be on for a variety of reasons and has absolutely no battery impact. Both on my ipad and my phone my arrow has been constantly on for years with no battery impact so its a permanent feature for me.
 
Shadow2k said:
Did you wear an Apple Watch at the time when you have noticed that behaviour? I get that whenever I wear my watch.
Click to expand...
No, Apple Watch is turned off when testing this. The reason the Apple Watch mostly causes the eternal hollow arrow is because of the weather app. If you don’t have a weather complication you won’t have the hollow arrow on your iPhone. It’s one of the reasons I don’t have the weather complication 😄


papbot said:
And you always will since you will get that “Phone Left Behind” alert on the watch if you leave your phone somewhere. That will override any Focus setting. When I go out for my daily exercise walk I only take my watch and I get that notification when I get a distance away from home even though starting an activity/workout holds other notifications by the Focus feature. And I like it that way, lets me know the feature is working. The hollow location arrow can be on for a variety of reasons and has absolutely no battery impact. Both on my ipad and my phone my arrow has been constantly on for years with no battery impact so its a permanent feature for me.
Click to expand...

You obviously can’t determine the battery impact if you don’t have a comparison between it on or off 😊 And it’s now extra annoying because the focus mode is using the same space. But I have never had a permanent hollow arrow, not on my iPhone nor iPad on none of the previous 14 iOS versions. And my iPad on version 15 is also not showing the Find My hollow arrow, only the iPhone. That’s why I suspect it’s a bug.
 
Shadow2k said:
Did you wear an Apple Watch at the time when you have noticed that behaviour? I get that whenever I wear my watch.
Click to expand...
happens with no watch connected. Only thing that makes it go away is turning off location for find my.
 
deuxani said:
You obviously can’t determine the battery impact if you don’t have a comparison between it on or off
Click to expand...
That’s true. But I never have it off and I can take my ipad off the charger in the morning fully charged, check it hours later and it’s still at 100%. I rarely do that with my phone because I’m using it a lot most days but when I have it’s dropped to maybe 96% about 4 hours later so I consider that no impact. the Find app is not only tracking your devices - ipad, watch, computer - it’s also live tracking any contacts you have it set up with. So unless you turn everything off there the arrow will always be on. As I said neither my devices nor my wife’s has ever had that arrow off for years and never had any battery issues except when my wife had the Facebook app going, that used to be a battery burner of epic proportions.
 
papbot said:
That’s true. But I never have it off and I can take my ipad off the charger in the morning fully charged, check it hours later and it’s still at 100%. I rarely do that with my phone because I’m using it a lot most days but when I have it’s dropped to maybe 96% about 4 hours later so I consider that no impact. the Find app is not only tracking your devices - ipad, watch, computer - it’s also live tracking any contacts you have it set up with. So unless you turn everything off there the arrow will always be on. As I said neither my devices nor my wife’s has ever had that arrow off for years and never had any battery issues except when my wife had the Facebook app going, that used to be a battery burner of epic proportions.
Click to expand...
But if you go into Settings > Privacy > Location Services > Location Services, do you there see Find My with a purple arrow or hollow arrow in front? Because the hollow arrow next to the clock can be many things. This issue is specific for the Find My system service. Obviously you don’t need to check it when you’ve just unlocked, because that’s when it’s updating. But it should go away after 20 seconds or so.

I don’t have live location or friends tracking on, so Find My should only check once in a while.
 
Do you use AirTags too? Mine is almost always on because I’ve got an AirTag on my backpack and I get the ‘left behind’ notification every time I get out of the van at work.
 
No AirTags either. But maybe it has to do with the Find My Network feature, come to think about it.
 
I don't have AirTags either. In fact the only two options I have turned on in System Services are Emergency Calls & SOS and Find My iPhone. Find My iPhone is always, always on, on both my iPad and iPhone. It has never turned off since updating to IOS 15. This wasn't the case in any of the other IOS'.
 
deuxani said:
The reason it’s annoying is that it gets higher priority over the focus mode icon, so if it’s always showing the hollow arrow I will never see which focus mode I’m using.
Click to expand...

I know this isn’t a solution but if you aren’t experiencing any battery impact you could turn off the status bar icon for system services.
 
StevenB14 said:
I know this isn’t a solution but if you aren’t experiencing any battery impact you could turn off the status bar icon for system services.
Click to expand...
Yeah I did just that 😊 The reason I have that icon turned on is to see if any service is stuck, that’s how I found out about this one. But as the Focus Mode icon is too important for me I had to turn the system services icon off for now.
 
Hi, I just updated my iPad and my wife’s iPad from iOS 14.8 to 15.1 and I had the same issue (I opened a new thred, then i saw this one). The icon is always on also in airplane mode, the only way to shut it off is disabling find my iPad in privacy settings. Sometimes the icon turn from hollow to “full” when I open apps, with no reason, and turn hollow again after a while or closing the app. Anyone solved this problem? (even if at this point I don't know if it's a problem or normal behavior, but it should happen to everyone!)
 
Definitely not normal behavior. In my two screenshots you can see both when the arrow next to Find My is filled in and when it’s not filled in that I’m not getting any indicator in the corner
 

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