All guides PinDrift

Ellis Mercer

I write the guides here. Mostly that means reading Apple’s documentation closely, then checking whether the apps actually behave the way it says they do.

Most writing about iPhone location goes wrong in one of two ways. Either it is a listicle put together by somebody who has never plugged a phone in, or it is a sales page wearing an explainer’s clothes. Both leave out the part you came for, which is almost always a caveat.

So these start with the answer. If you asked whether an app can tell you are spoofing, the first sentence says yes, no, or "it depends, and here is what on". Everything after that is the working.

What I write about

Location on iOS, mostly. How Core Location actually decides where it thinks you are. What a tracking app can and cannot see when it looks. What each of those Settings toggles really does, as opposed to what its label implies.

Some of it involves PinDrift and some of it does not. The piece on turning off location sharing does not need us in it, so we are not in it.

I also write the comparison pages, which is the least comfortable part of the job. They name the competitors that beat us, because a comparison where we win everything is not a comparison. It is an advert with a table in it, and readers can tell.

How they get written

Slower than they look. A claim about what Life360 shows your circle means opening Life360 and looking at it. A claim about an iOS version means testing on that version, not on whichever one happens to be on the phone nearest me. Plenty of it is just re-running something I was already fairly sure about, because "fairly sure" has embarrassed me before.

When something cannot be tested, the page says so rather than rounding up to certainty. The habit I am proudest of is publishing what was not tested: it is usually more useful than the results, and it is the half almost everyone leaves out.

One thing I will never write is that spoofing cannot be detected. Nobody knows that. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something, and in fairness, so am I, which is exactly why I am not going to tell you that.

When I get it wrong

It happens. When it does, the page gets fixed in place with the change visible, not quietly swapped so it looks like it was always right.

If you spot something off, a number, a claim, a competitor’s feature I have described badly, hello@pindrift.app. That goes double if you work at one of the companies on the comparison pages. You know your product better than I do, and I would much rather be corrected than quoted wrongly.

Everything I have written here

More are written and scheduled; they appear here as they publish. The publishing schedule is kept in the repository alongside the guides.

Elsewhere