One notable change, which will be immediately obvious, is a more prominent blue status bar that appears when an app is actively using your location while running in the background.
The change could impact apps that heavily rely on location data – whether that’s because of their use case, like Foursquare or Moves, or because they sneak access to location data for less reputable purposes, like reselling location data to vendors or displaying location-based ads without users knowing.
However, this change is not the only way that iOS 11 is cracking down on apps that overstep in terms of tracking location data.
Many apps prior to today only allowed users to pick between “Always” and “Never,” when it came to sharing their location data. Obviously, by selecting “Never,” certain apps that needed location to work would simply be unusable. With iOS 11, the third option – “While Using the App” – can be selected for any app, even if the developer didn’t make it available before.
The blue bar goes a step further to actually warn users when apps set to “Always” are actively tracking location.
