Apple today began sending out emails to customers who purchased popular automation app Workflow in the last few weeks, letting them know that they'll be receiving a refund for the purchase price of the app.
Apple is handing out refunds because following its recent acquisition of the Workflow app and team, it made the Workflow app free to download and removed some key functionality.
A MacRumors reader shared his refund email with us, and we've also seen several reports of Workflow refunds from Twitter.
Dear iTunes Customer,
Thank you for purchasing Workflow by DeskConnect, Inc. Workflow is now available for free in the App Store. Since you recently purchased this app, we have issued you a full refund in the amount of $3.23. These funds will be applied to your original payment method and may take up to five business days from the issue date to post to your account.Regards,
iTunes Support Team
http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/ww/
For those unfamiliar with Workflow, which is now owned by Apple, it's an automation tool that allows users to create a variety of workflows to automate tasks like creating GIFs from a series of photos, translating an article, posting photos to multiple social networks at once, calculating a tip, and tons more.
Following Apple's acquisition of Workflow, there was an update to remove certain features, including workflow functionality that involved Google Chrome, Pocket, LINE, Telegram, and Uber, likely for legal reasons.
Apple plans to keep Workflow available in the App Store, and it is now a free download. [Direct Link]
Top Rated Comments
* Turn on low power mode
* Close all open apps
I would hope that with the acquisition maybe a deeper integration w/ iOS would occur but I suppose if that were the case then Apple would just build these features right into iOS.
*and before anyone starts harping on me about why open apps don't matter, I don't care, I like them closed
All this also only applies to this one particular location service aspect of it, while there are other ones related to VoIP, audio playback, and a few others that can allow apps to perform tasks in the background if they have been used at some point and are simply in background (suspended or otherwise), but not if they are completely closed (either haven't been launched or have been closed/terminated).
Basically that is to say that there are certainly circumstances where removing the app from the recent apps list to actually fully close/terminate it can have an effect of stopping it from doing something in the background which it otherwise might be doing.
"Note: If your app is terminated either by a user or by the system, the system doesn’t automatically restart your app when new location updates arrive. A user must explicitly relaunch your app before the delivery of location updates resumes. The only way to have your app relaunched automatically is to use region monitoring or the significant-change location service.
However, when a user disables the Background App Refresh setting either globally or specifically for your app, the system doesn’t relaunch your app for any location events, including significant-change or region monitoring events. Further, while Background App Refresh is off your app won’t receive significant-change or region monitoring events even when it's in the foreground. When a user reenables Background App Refresh for your app, Core Location restores all background services, including any previously registered regions."