How to requestPermission for devicemotion and deviceorientation events in iOS 13+

Background

Since iOS 12.2, Apple decided that for privacy reasons, the in-browser access to the device motion and orientation events is off by default. And now maybe they realized this might be a mistake, so in iOS 13 they changed the permission request behavior similar to how the camera permission is requested.

So now when we try to addEventListener to devicemotion or deviceorientation, we would see this warning in the console:

To request permission, we would just need to call a method on the DeviceMotionEvent or DeviceOrientationEvent: requestPermission 😂 It would return a promise that always resolve to a PermissionState which could be granted or denied (so basically Promise<'granted'|'denied'>).

One more thing

One more thing to keep in mind is that requestPermission could only be called on a user gesture (e.g. click). This is reasonable UX too as we would want to tell users why we are asking for such permissions and let them confirm before prompting them so that they see it coming.

Otherwise you would get this error:

The code to copy

For devicemotion events:

  function onClick() {
    // feature detect
    if (typeof DeviceMotionEvent.requestPermission === 'function') {
      DeviceMotionEvent.requestPermission()
        .then(permissionState => {
          if (permissionState === 'granted') {
            window.addEventListener('devicemotion', () => {});
          }
        })
        .catch(console.error);
    } else {
      // handle regular non iOS 13+ devices
    }
  }

and for deviceorientation events:

  function onClick() {
    // feature detect
    if (typeof DeviceOrientationEvent.requestPermission === 'function') {
      DeviceOrientationEvent.requestPermission()
        .then(permissionState => {
          if (permissionState === 'granted') {
            window.addEventListener('deviceorientation', () => {});
          }
        })
        .catch(console.error);
    } else {
      // handle regular non iOS 13+ devices
    }
  }

That's it. Thank you for reading!