BTT keeps asking permission for Location

Despite giving BTT access to the Privacy > Location Services, it keeps asking me to grant permission every single time I open my Mac.

I think Apple fixed this with the latest macOS update a few weeks ago.

It didn't.

they definitely improved it, while there have been reports almost daily before the macOS update, I didn’t have any reports since… but maybe there are still cases where it fails ;-(

I bought the license and I am regretting it. I have to select and deselect permissions 4 to 6 times a days. It is slowly my workflow instead of speeding it up.
Please fix it.
I'm on Big Sur 11.7 and can't upgrade to monterey because of some hardware I use for work that would stop working on that OS.

unfortunately only Apple could fix this. A reinstall of macOS usually fixes this but is obviously quite annoying to do. It’s unlikely Apple will update the old OS to fix any non security related issue ;-(

This can easily be fixed by folivora, just give the user the option to stop getting notifications about location services and then stop the popup from showing up. Or just do one pop-up and stop after that. This is totally under your control.

It's very annoying, it only happens with BTT, and it seems to turn off location permissions every-time the MacBook is put to sleep. Then when it's awoken, BTT seems to attempt to enable location services multiple times, hence the endless pop up warnings.

Thanks.

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@tariq This is a horrible way to request any support, you obviously don't know what you are talking about.

I apologize Andreas, I did come off very rude, so I'm sorry.

Just frustrated with something you should be able to fix, and only BTT seems to have this issue with location settings.

Really, I didn't mean to offend you, it was wrong of me, sorry again.

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It's not only BTT. Basically every developer I talked to who uses location and has many users, has at least a handful of users who encounter this issue. It's a bug in macOS. Even in BTT it's much less than 1% of users who ever encounter this.

BTT only uses location if you use it somewhere in BTT. E.g. if you have a weather widget and have enabled the "Automatically get location".

BTT needs to know whether location is enabled or not, otherwise it would crash when accessing location data. So if you have enabled auto location in the weather widget (or use some script in BTT that uses the location) BTT needs to ask macOS "Does BetterTouchTool have permission to use the location?". The first time macOS responds with "The user has not yet been asked" and then continues to show the message you receive. Usually every further request returns just "YES" or "NO" to that question and doesn't trigger the popup. Unfortunately on some systems the location database seems to be corrupted, therefore macOS doesn't save the decision of the user and continues to return "The user has not yet been asked" - followed by the message you see.

That makes sense, thank you for the detailed explanation Andreas. Too bad there isn't a way to suppress it.

I am using a weather widget on my touch bar, I think I'll disable it, don't really use it anyway, just looks cool :wink:

Thanks

you can enter the location manually for the widget (if you don’t travel too much)

That's a good alternative, thanks for the suggestion.

It's 5 months later now and we are all probably on Ventura by now - and it is still happening. Everytime I get the popup, I go into settings and have to re-enable Location Services for BTT. I have no other apps that are doing this. It really feels like a BTT issue, not a MacOS issue.

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Before Ventura I received reports about this almost daily, since Ventura I think you are the first one to report it. That makes me strongly believe this is some sort of macOS issue (especially as we devs do not have any influence on the permissions database)

But maybe it's an option for you to set a fixed location in the weather widget? Then BTT will not request the location at all

MacOS Ventura 13.0.1. It seems like all of the problems persist. Or even worse, it still pops up even when I go into privacy settings and grant BTT permission to location information. (And it did showed a gray location icon, signifying BTT accessed location information in the past 24hr) So I ended up giving up and moved the pop-up window to the very corner.
If this is a MacOS problem, can you provide some direction where I can report this to? No idea how this could happen, and I'm struggling to clearly define and describe the problem. Thanks!

user feedback can be submitted here. Just say the location settings do not persist.

Product Feedback - Apple

One thing you could try is to reset the location database via this terminal command:
sudo rm /private/var/db/locationd/clients.plist && sudo killall locationd
This will however reset all location permissions for all apps, however it might clean any corruption that might affect that database.

Hello—I also have this problem. It had gone away for a few weeks, but it's back now. It's terrible to wake up to my Macbook Pro's fans running.

Might there be a way to add a master toggle in BTT settings that disallows BTT from accessing any location information at all?

At the very least, is there a way to way pare back the energy used while the grant-permission prompt is on the screen? (This would help with the fans.) Or even to let users just dismiss the prompt without granting permission?

yes, just uncheck the auto location checkbox on any weather widget you use :wink: That's the only place where BTT uses location data

However your fans running is not related to location permissions, it's another effect of the same macOS bug though.

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I'm having the same issue with the popup window. I turned it on and off in the accessibility area as suggested elsewhere, and restarted my computer twice but the problem still exists. And even if i move the window to some out of the way area of my monitors it eventually pops back to an annoying place all by itself.
I'm running ventura 13.4.1

bettertouch Version 4.170 (2388)

Unlike the OP i only have bettertouch turned on in accessibility. I don't see how to get it showing up in "Privacy > Location Services"

I guess my issue is slightly different.
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