Is it possible to pause / resume Offline Map Area downloads ?

[EricLiu]

Good morning Esri team, 

We are trying to implement downloading map areas in the 200.6 SDK while the device is in sleep mode. The issue we've come across is that while the app is backgrounded, the OS may interrupt our background process and resume it when it feels like it. To work around this we would need the ability to pause & resume our map area downloads. 

So far we've been using OfflineMapTask and DownloadPreplannedMapAreas. While this works fine for downloading continuously, we are not sure which functions / parameters to use in order to pause & resume downloads.

[PreetiMaske · Accepted solution]

This exact feature is on our priority list for April 2026 release and is planned to be a toolkit component that you can simply add to your app. It is somewhat a complicated feature because of different backgrounding capabilities on platforms supported by .NET Maps SDK.

BTW, What platform are you trying to build this feature on ? Can you also elaborate the workflow so we can take it into account when we are building this tool.

Thanks,

Preeti

[EricLiu]

@PreetiMaske Glad to hear it's on Esri's radar!

We are developing in .NET Maui, which supports iOS, Android, and Windows. By background we mean while the device is asleep w/ screen off or when the user is using another app.

We hope the toolkit component will support background download for preplanned and custom offline map areas. Ideally any utility network included in the map area should be downloaded also. If the download failed, it should fail gracefully. 

We are also trying to start the download in the background. This way the download can be scheduled for a specific time at night instead of having the user manually opening their device to start the download.

The main limitations we've ran into so far are:

1. Trying to stay connected to the ArcGIS Portal while backgrounded.

2. iOS will interrupt our background download process when it needs to prioritize another background process, or when we've reached our 'time budget'. To workaround this, we have to pause & resume our download and do it in 'bursts'. It would help if the toolkit component can work through this or provide a robust api to pause / resume downloads.

Thank you

[JoeHershman]

My understanding is that in iOS this is partially by design of the operating system.  I look forward to seeing what the development team comes up with, but I think this will be difficult in iOS.

What we do in iOS is to set the 

UIApplication.SharedApplication.IdleTimerDisabled

This needs to be done in a code file that is located in the iOS platform folder, because it is iOS specific.

We use eventing, when the user kicks off a download process an event fires that calls

private static void OnTurnOffIdleTimer(bool isIdleTimerDisabled)
{
	UIApplication.SharedApplication.IdleTimerDisabled = isIdleTimerDisabled;
}

 When the process finishes we turn off.

The user does need to stay in the app, but it keeps it from going to sleep.  During training we make sure users understand they cannot go do something else while it downloads.