Thanks for the (very) quick reply. Part on the location background mode is clear now, thanks! On the Bluetooth solution; this didn't work in our tests. Sometimes the app was started but more often it didn't (and no data was sent to our servers). That is why we went back to the location approach which is used as fallback mechanism and does seem to work reliably. When the app is not fully terminated this approach does work as expected and no significant change is used. But if possible, we'd like to do without location services at all and solely depend on CoreBluetooth. What are we doing wrong? How we implemented the Bluetooth solution is keeping a list of known peripheral IDs, and on disconnect use those to retrievePeripheralsWithIdentifiers and then do this: for (CBPeripheral* peripheral in self.knownPeripherals) { [self.centralManager connectPeripheral:peripheral options:nil]; } You mentioned "scanning". Do you mean to just call scanForPeripherals withService on every disconnect instead of this connect to make it work even when terminated?