Want to pretend you’re somewhere you’re not? Check out our handy guide on faking out your iPhone or Android phone’s GPS location.
Modern smartphones have long been equipped with location-aware features that combine global positioning system (GPS) hardware with other features like Wi-Fi and cellular triangulation to help get an accurate fix on your location nearly anywhere in the world. These typically work very well, but what about those times you want your iPhone or Android smartphone to think it’s somewhere else?
Perhaps you’re trying out an app that searches for nearby stores or restaurants in another city, wanting to access services that are only available within a specific country or region, or playing a location-based game. Whatever the reason, sometimes it’s useful to be somewhere else as far as your smartphone is concerned. The good news is that with the right tools, it’s not difficult to spoof your GPS location.
Before we begin, it’s important to keep in mind that this process isn’t foolproof, and can have unintended side effects. For example, while you’re running an app that fakes your GPS location, it will affect built-in services like Find My iPhone and Find My Androidbecause the location of any nearby AirTags will be misreported, and your phone will possibly even supply an incorrect location to emergency services like 911. That last part depends on how your local 911 call center handles things, but it’s a risk that’s worth mentioningas, for example, if you stumble and fall while you’re out playing Pokemon GOwith a fake location, emergency responders might have a more difficult time finding you.
And since these techniques use built-in developer features, it’s possible for third-party apps to see that you’re spoofing your location. They still won’t be able to get your real location, but they’ll know you’re „cheating“ and may refuse to use or believe your location until you stop faking it.
Lastly, there’s no need to go so far as faking your location if you simply want to hide. In that case, you can switch off location services entirely and none of the apps on your phone will have any idea where you are.Using a VPN versus faking your GPS location
You may have already heard about how a virtual private network (VPN) can be used to spoof your location so you can access geographically restricted services, such as a streaming provider that’s not available in your home country.
Using a VPN is different from spoofing your GPS location on your phone. A VPN works at the network level to mask your real IP address, making it look like you’re connecting to a service from another country. However, it doesn’t change where your smartphone thinks it’s located, just where the service on the other end sees you coming from. This works quite well with most online services, since they rarely bother to try and engage your GPS to confirm your location. However, there are a few that do, the most notorious of which is MLB at Bat, which checks both your IP address and your GPS location to determine if you’re in a blackout area. That means if you want to watch home games in your area while on your mobile device, you’ll need to use a VPN and GPS spoofing in tandem to overcome the blackout restrictions. Just keep in mind that your mileage may vary here, as some of these apps are also clever enough to check if you’re faking your GPS location, as we mentioned earlier.How to fake your GPS location on an iPhone
If you’re using an iPhone, faking your GPS location can be a somewhat complicated affair due to Apple’s tight security restrictions. While there are several apps on the App Store that claim to do this, we can only charitably call them misleading.
