During the development of my iPhone app, I decided to integrate Google Maps by including a UIWebView with a URL I construct pointing to maps.google.com. The problem is that the website tries to get the user's location, displaying the "This app wants to use your location". This creates a number of issues for me, which I can explain if necessary.
Is there any way to disable the UIWebView / Mobile Safari from asking for the user's location. The only workaround I can think of is to use Google's Javascript v3 API to make my own map, but I would have to get a license and I'm not 100% certain I would be able to disable asking for location (although I think I can).
Does anyone have an alternate workaround or way of tackling this issue? Thanks!
I believe I found a suitable workaround for now. I remembered that you can embed maps from Google in your website using an iframe. I checked the url they construct to do this and noticed they appended an extra parameter, "output=embed". I appended the "output" variable in the url and pasted this into Mobile Safari on the simulator and it no longer asks me for my location.
The only drawback of this is that I can see so far is that there are some extra UI components on the page as it includes both the mobile controls and website embed controls on the page. Also, I have not tested this on an actual device yet.
Edit: Testing on the device showed that the embed controls don't work, but the mobile controls work as does every other aspect of the map.
Use an MKMapView instead.
(I'm assuming there's a reason you're not using MKMapView for this task and you're stuck with the UIWebView)
You might try asking for user location earlier in your application via CLLocationManager, i.e. right after launch. The permission alert will not be shown more than once. (whether the user chooses to allow or not, which you do not seem to care about)
Not entirely sure that this will work in your case though, UIWebView may still prompt for permission to share location data with the websites it shows.
Assuming it's done via JavaScript, you could try injecting some javascript in - (void)webViewDidStartLoad:(UIWebView *)webView using -[UIWebView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:] (e.g. you could set the location-requesting function to null). I'm not entirely sure how well that works while the page is still loading, though...
