Thursday, February 23, 2017

True North and the iOS Compass App

I recently got a 2 star review for my TV Towers USA app.

This would be a nice app if it pointed in the right direction!  Most of the time its sense of

direction differs from the compass app.

How can that be? ⭐⭐

Well, the short answer is that the iOS compass app tries to act like an old timey compass where North means magnetic North, and TV Towers USA instead is displaying the direction based on North being the Earth's north pole. You can go into the settings for the Compass app, turn on "True North", quit the Compass app and from then on, it will act like a super-compass that can calculate the location of the North Pole based on both magnetism and location.

I've put together a short video to describe the situation, and how to configure the iOS compass app.