Apple to bolster iOS location services with ‘exciting new features’, according to job posting

There seems to be a cottage industry of people trying to ascertain what Apple’s next move will be, be it in the hardware or software field. A recent job posting for a iOS QA Location Engineer has people talking as the release of iOS5 nears in the Fall.

According to the posting, which is for a position at Apple’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California, the successful applicant would be “responsible for qualifying the latest iOS products, working on exciting new features for iOS location services.”

Compared to Google’s Android, iOS has very limited location-specific features, and still relies on a relatively low-featured version of Google Maps for its mapping services. In addition, while iOS4 allowed navigation software to continue to work in the background, there is much untapped potential for the wildly successful operating system to implement.

One aspect in which we know location will be implemented in the upcoming iOS5 release is in Apple’s Reminders app which allows you to set tasks with geographical confines. When you near a supermarket, for instance, the app will alert you to “buy milk” or “pick up dinner” if you’ve set the task beforehand. And we can’t forget the incident earlier in the year where Apple was accused of logging users’ location information for their geo-location database, a practice they ended in a subsequent software update.

Source: Apple
Via AppleInsider & BGR