Crowdsensing under recent mobile platform background service restrictions: a practical approach

Crowdsensing applications are a popular and common research tool, because they allow volunteering participants to provide valuable data via their mobile phones with minimal effort. In most scenarios, it is an important goal to gather data in a reliable and continuous way, while the app runs in the background to avoid disturbing the user. However, in recent versions, Android as well as iOS severely restrict the functionality of an app when it does not have the authorization of a foreground process. In this work, we present a structured overview of the technical state of background service restrictions under iOS (12) and Android (9). We demonstrate a practical approach for working with these restrictions by utilizing the respective operating system's location provider solution.