NOTICE: This question was originally posted before Apple introduced motion-detection hardware and associated APIs in the iOS SDK. Answers to
The CLLocation
based check is the only reliable information you can get. As specified by Ali in Need to find Distance using Gyro+Accelerometer it is useless to find velocity and position for a longer period of time. The integrated acceleration values start drifting after 0.5 - 2 seconds and there is no chance to get them calibrated again.
Depending on your use case I see some more problems than Usain Bolt's 44.72 km/h (27.79 mph):
You can use this simple library to detect if user is walking, running, on vehicle or not moving.
Works on all iOS devices and no need M7 chip.
https://github.com/SocialObjects-Software/SOMotionDetector
In repo you can find demo project
Xcode 7.3, iOS 9.3
Thanks to all the original contributors.
I just spent a few hours trying to understand why this fairly straight forward class was not working for me. I used all the suggestion above and from other posts to see what activity iOS thought the user was performing using Core Motion framework and using the CMMotionActivityManager
class.
Turns out that for whatever reason I had my "Fitness Tracking" in "Settings"->"Privacy"->"Motion & Fitness" turned off. And for whatever reason after adding the framework and calling a CM class, the app. did not request to enable this. I must have turned this off manually.
Eventually I stumbled onto this post...
iOS - is Motion Activity Enabled in Settings > Privacy > Motion Activity
Which lead me to check the setting and resolve the issue. After I flipped "Fitness Tracking" to on and ran the app. again, everything worked like a charm.
Hopefully this saves someone some time! Cheers.
All the advice about the wisdom (or lack thereof) in guessing about motion states from location data still applies. But regarding your update about Core Motion and M7...
Yes, you can use Core Motion on devices with an M7, M8, M9, etc motion coprocessor(*) to get an indication of whether the user might be driving.
isActivityAvailable
to determine whether you you have M7(+) features), and either start activity updates or query it for recent activities.automotive
property to see if iOS thinks the user is/was in a car.Like the GPS inferences, though, you should still take this information with a grain of salt. CoreMotion APIs give you iOS' best guess as to the user's activity, but there's no guarantee it's 100% accurate. (For example, I'm not sure if riding a train might count as automotive
. Also note that the different activity types are not mutually exclusive.) It's better for your app to check for the activity types you're interested in than to try to exclude the ones you don't want.
(*) M7 devices are those with the A7 SoC: iPhone 5s, iPad Air, iPad mini 2. M8 is A8, M9 is A9, etc. In short, every iOS device introduced since Fall 2013, excluding iPhone 5c.