Moviepass worked great for me until the latest update and now it says that it needs me to enable “location services”. When I tap the button nothing happens though. Help!
Ah, well, there’s a backstory behind the location services, actually. Turns out that MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe boasted at an industry conference that they track lots of customer information, including having the app track you even when you weren’t using it. In fact, they told Variety that they just removed a feature from the iOS app that would have let the company continuously track the location of customers. Not so good.
This update to the MoviePass app changes how it uses location services, so it’s no surprise that it requires you to revalidate its permission to track your location. That there’s a slight glitch in the permissions settings, well, that’s just how it goes. Fortunately, it’s easy to fix things up.
Here’s what you’ll see the first time you launch MoviePass once you get the March, 2018 update:
What’s confusing here is that as far as I can tell, the big red “Enable location services” does nothing. Like a great action movie, it’s up to you to fix things and get back to the movies!
The easiest way to do that is to go to the separate “Settings” app on your iPhone and swipe down. A search box shows up (did you know that was there?):
From this point, simply type in “location” and it’ll show you a variety of different settings and options that match that pattern:
This is such a useful feature I’m really not at all sure why it’s hidden on the main Settings screen. My guess is most people don’t know it even exists, but… now you do! On the list of results, the choice you seek is the one with the hand icon: “Location / Privacy”. Tap on it.
Now you’re here are there are quite a few different options. Scroll down (well, swipe down) until you find “MoviePass“, as shown:
There’s the problem: MoviePass is set to Never for access to Location Services. That just needs to be tweaked to “While Using”, which can be done by tapping on that particular entry on the list. Before you do that, though, have a quick glance at the other apps with permission to access your location: If any are a surprise to you, revoke their permission! Worst case, the app will complain and you can reenable it later. In particular, be judicious about “Always” as a setting as that’s really giving away a lot of your privacy.
Tapped on “MoviePass”? Good. Here’s what you’ll see:
As shown, make sure it’s set to “While Using the App“. Done. That’s it.
Now go back to MoviePass and try again. It should work just fine now:
Now, which movie to go see? I suggest Annihilation or Black Panther personally. 🙂