Windows Phone 8 - Keeping background location tracking active beyond four hours

Windows Phone 8 - Keeping background location tracking active beyond four

hours



I'm in the process of developing a WP8 app that makes use of the

background location tracking abilities provided by the OS. The idea is to

monitor the users position and to notify them when they are near certain

types of places.

So far it all seems to work fine and when running the location tracking

works as I would expect.

The problem is, it seems that the phone times out background apps after

around four hours, stopping the location tracking.

I can understand why Microsoft did it, to preserve battery life etc. But

there's not much point having a background location tracking app that has

to be manually restarted every four hours! If a user chooses to run this

app and is made aware of the potential battery hit, surely it should be

able to run indefinitely - to a point of course, if the system runs out of

resources or similar then that's fair enough.

Does anyone have any experience with this? There must be hundreds of

others apps in the store that have run into this issue I would have

thought? And presumably there must be some way of keeping the location

tracking running?

I've tried periodically updating the live tile (using a DispatcherTimer)

while the tracking is running but this doesn't seem to be enough to keep

the app alive either :(

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks.