[Solved] What .plist stores Location Services settings?

parabel

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Aug 27, 2009
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Hi! I have an evasi0n-jailbroken iPhone 4S on iOS 6.1.2.
Recently, my phone suddenly (after a small crash) "forgot" all the app-specific settings under "Settings, Privacy, Location Services". This means that every app is not allowed GPS-access anymore, until I open every single app that needs GPS, at which point it will ask me again about access. Since i have hundreds of apps, I would like to work around this method.

I do have backups of the settings when it still remembered which apps were allowed to use GPS. The backups are in PkgBackup and also iTunes backup, which I can then extract. So all I need to know is which particular .plist file(s) store that information.
I have already looked into some plist's in /private/var/mobile/Library/Preferences, like com.apple.locationd.plist, but that doesn't seem to contain the right information. Does anyone know where the location services settings are stored?

Thanks!
 
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AmpedPotato

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Dec 9, 2012
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Re: What .plist stores Location Services settings?

I know that when I delete com.apple.LaunchServices-045.csstore and com.apple.mobile.installation.plist from /var/mobile/Library/Caches for various Siri-related issues and sometimes to fix the Weather app my iPhone has to relearn my Location Services preferences. So you could replace those two files with backups. Don't forget to make backups of the files you are replacing, just in case.


Sent from my iPhone 4S using Tapatalk
 

parabel

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Re: What .plist stores Location Services settings?

Thanks for your suggestion! (I remember doing that as well back when I tried to fix the weather app after jailbreaking.)
That is a good idea. But unfortunately, those files were not stored in any of my backups. (And just deleting them wouldn't help and since I have so many apps, having the iPhone reindex them all when booting often leads to a time-out after 10 minutes and it aborts, reboots and tries again. So it would even be a bit of a gamble.)

But fortunately, I found a solution! I'll post it here, in case anyone is interested:

First, I SSH'ed into my phone and was surprised to find no "locationd" directory within /private/var/mobile/Library/Caches/, even though "iPhone Backup Extractor" showed it had a "locationd" folder in Library/Caches. But extracting it from the backup and putting it in /private/var/root/Library/Caches/ (and then rebooting/respringing) didn't have any effect.

Then I found out here, that the locationd is actually located here: /private/var/root/Library/Caches/locationd. So that's where I copied the extracted files from the locationd folder in my iTunes backup ("clients.plist", "significant.plist", "consolidated.db", "gyroCal.db", but the Clients.plist is the main place were the settings are stored). For WinSCP users: Make sure that for those 4 files, Group is set to wheel [0], Owner to root [0] and the permissions are 0644 (rw-r--r--).
It's important to immediately turn the phone off after copying the files there, or the iPhone will soon overwrite the clients.plist again with the wrong or emtpy information. After turning it back on, all the previously GPS-authorized apps were listed again in "Settings, Privacy, Location Services"! :)
 

savillev

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Dec 30, 2014
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Re: What .plist stores Location Services settings?

I know that when I delete com.apple.LaunchServices-045.csstore and com.apple.mobile.installation.plist from /var/mobile/Library/Caches for various Siri-related issues and sometimes to fix the Weather app my iPhone has to relearn my Location Services preferences. So you could replace those two files with backups. Don't forget to make backups of the files you are replacing, just in case.


Sent from my iPhone 4S using Tapatalk

How do I get to the directory on my iPad 3??? I have no sound . Seen on other thread to delete a line from the directory file.
 

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