A Serendipitous Discovery

Unlike a lot of people, I don’t leave Location Services turned on all the time even though I can control which apps use it and under what circumstances (Always, When in Use, Never). This minimizes any tracking and cuts down on battery usage. I turn it on when I want to use an app that requires it, like Maps, or for pictures so it will capture location data. Otherwise it is off. 

Turning it off and on is an extra step in Settings that requires several taps, but I have put up with it for privacy reasons. When Shortcuts came out I thought that I might be able to configure a Shortcut to do this, but that wasn’t as easy as it should be. I found that I could use Siri to get to the Location Services screen by saying, “Hey, Siri. Show me Location Services.”Then I would turn it on or off. It takes almost as long to do the Siri command as it does to do the appropriate number of Settings taps.

Then two days ago when I used the Siri command, I accidentally said, “Hey Siri. Turn on Location Services and it brought up the screen and turned it on. Wow! Just what I’ve always wanted. I think I even had sent feedback to Apple about this. Something has changed in iOS 13.x to bring this about. When I want to turn off Location Services, I say, “Hey, Siri. Turn off location Services.” and it does that, but says something to the effect that it will turn off Location Services for all apps and asks me to confirm if I want to do that. That requires an addition, “Yes”, but this is fine given it does exactly what I want. Way to go, Siri!