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Whenever I am downloading maps (which I’m only doing when on wifi), Pocket Earth will, after few minutes, disconnect my phone from the wifi network and force it to switch to 3G (iPhone 4s, iOS 8.1.1., but also 7.1.2 in the past, PocketEarth v 2.4, Network mode “wifi only”). This has already cost me over 20 Euros for consuming data outside my 500MB bundle from my mobile network provider. At any rate this happens when PocketEarth is running in the background, but perhaps also when it’s in the foreground. Only thing that helps is disabling cellular data, but in that case wifi is also being disconnected after a few minutes. This only happens when PocketEarth is downloading maps, I cannot find any other app to blame for this behavior. Please resolve this issue, otherwise I’ll have to resort to Google Maps…
OK so maybe I’ve been complaining too much – or this is something that only affects me. Well, I would be really grateful if at least the wifi-only mode is really wifi-only. I suspect that currently it only checks for a wifi connection at the beginning of map downloading. If the iDevice is thrown into cellular data mode sometime during download it won’t pause downloading. It would save me a lot of cost if it did.
And maybe it’s not a problem of PocketEarth that my iPhone is always disconnected from wifi a few minutes after map downloading starts. Maybe my router doesn’t like to transfer map data to my iPhone. Strange thing, though, is that I’ve now discovered that these problems don’t occur with my iPad 2 (which doesn’t have 3G/4G), same OS, same version of PocketEarth.Pocket Earth uses Apple’s standard downloading functionality to do its downloads so it should be no different than other apps. We limit the number of simultaneous downloads intentionally to avoid drowning out older WiFi networks, and have not seen or had any reported issues with it before.
Provided the Network mode setting in Pocket Earth is set to WiFi Only, then when the WiFi goes out, it will pause the download until it comes back (PE will still show Downloading message but it will not advance the download). This also relies on information Apple provides us about the current network, and we haven’t seen any cases where it erroneously downloaded via Cellular when in WiFi Only mode. Of course if you want to be 100% sure, and this is something we recommend to all our users in general to avoid data charges when traveling, is to go into the Settings App > Cellular and disable Cellular Data completely. Many other apps will download data over Cellular even when in the background, so we highly recommend changing this setting when roaming.
Please note, if PE is downloading data and you close our app, it will only continue downloading for 2 minutes as Apple places this restriction on how long we can run in the background. We could download longer than 2 minutes when in background like other apps do, but we would not be able to control weather the downloads are over WiFi or Cellular so we chose never to do this.
Thanks for your reply. Probably the fact that my iPhone is disconnected from wifi is caused by my router, not by PE. Apparently when downloading map data, my iPhone (but not my iPad) does things that my router does not tolerate.
But I’m 100% sure that, even when PE is in WiFi only mode, my iPhone sometimes switches to cellular data, and in that case PE continues its downloads using the 3G network (which costs me a lot of money once my limit has been reached). When downloading maps to my iPhone, the only thing I can do, even at home with my WiFi network up and running, is to disable Cellular Data completely.
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