iPhone location permissions, explained properly

Two of these settings do nearly all the work. Set anything that does not need background access to While Using the App, and turn Precise Location off for anything that is not a map. Everything below is the working.

Settings, Privacy and Security, Location Services. Most people set these once at install and never return, which is a shame, because the difference between two of these options is enormous.

Use that list rather than each app’s own entry in Settings: the information here is comparative, and you find the forgotten app by scanning one column. The master switch at the top is blunter than it looks. Off, it takes Find My, automatic time zone and every map you own with it, emergency calls being the documented exception. If that is the goal, turning off location sharing is the narrower operation people usually mean.

The four access levels

Never. No location, ever. The app may complain; many work fine anyway.

Ask Next Time Or When I Share. No standing access. The app prompts again when it needs one. Useful for something you use rarely.

While Using the App. Location only while the app is open and on screen. This is the right answer for the large majority of apps, and iOS shows an arrow in the status bar while it is happening.

Always. Background access, including when the app is closed. Required for geofence alerts and genuine background tracking. This is the one worth auditing, because it is the one that gets granted casually and then never revisited.

Note how an app reaches Always, because it is not the prompt you remember. That one offers Allow Once, Allow While Using the App, and Don’t Allow. Background access is earned in a second step, by taking what it can get and triggering a separate prompt later. Anything sitting on Always asked you twice, or was set here by hand.

Allow Once and Ask Next Time are the same state from two angles: tapping Allow Once is what leaves the row reading Ask Next Time Or When I Share. That is a deferral rather than a permission, and for an app you open twice a year it is the right answer.

While Using is wider than it sounds. An app counts as in use on screen, for a grace period after you swipe away, and while it holds something in the status bar, which is why directions keep talking when you reply to a message. A hollow arrow means something is waiting on a boundary instead: that is geofencing, and it is the legitimate reason to ask for Always.

Precise Location, the one that matters

Separate from the four above, and more consequential than any of them. Off, the app receives an area several kilometres across rather than a point.

Ask what an app actually needs. Weather needs a region. A news app needs a region. A store locator needs a region. None of them need your street, and most of them will not notice the difference.

The switch sits on each app’s own screen rather than in the main list, which is why people miss it. One exception: an app can ask for precise access for the current session only, and it reverts when you put the app down. A delivery app asking once, at the door, is the honest version. An app asking every time it opens is telling you something.

The apps that genuinely lose something are the ones where a few hundred metres changes the answer: navigation, a running tracker measuring pace, a ride-hail app finding the right kerb. For the rest, the point was never as exact as the dot implies. iPhone GPS is good, not surgical.

The permissions that are not on this screen

Location Services governs one route to your position. There are others, and several are not gated by anything on this page.

• Your IP address. Every app with a network connection has it, no permission involved and no way to decline. It is why an app set to Never still greets you by city.
• Bluetooth. A separate permission and a positioning system in disguise. Beacons in shops sit at fixed known coordinates, and an app that sees them can place you inside a building.
• Local Network. Also separate. It shows an app what else is on your Wi-Fi, which is a fingerprint of the room you are in.
• Motion and Fitness. Not location, but the raw material for checking one: steps, and whether you walked or drove between two of them.
• Photos. The quiet one. Photos carry coordinates in their metadata, so full library access hands over a location history you assembled yourself, going back years.

Sending a picture, the Options row at the top of the share sheet has a Location toggle that strips the coordinate from that copy. For who collects what, what location data apps collect covers it.

The periodic prompt

Every so often iOS shows a small map of where an app with Always permission has been reading you, and asks whether to keep allowing it.

Read it rather than dismissing it. It is the only moment the system shows you the shape of what an app has actually collected, instead of asking you to reason about a permission in the abstract.

It offers two answers, keep Always or drop to While Using, and dismissing it postpones the question rather than settling it. It is also an argument for never granting Always in the first place.

A five minute audit

Worth doing once, then leaving alone.

• Read the right hand column top to bottom, looking for Always and for names you no longer recognise.
• Anything on Always that is not maps, fitness or safety goes to While Using. If something breaks it will say so.
• Check Precise Location inside whatever survives on Always.
• Find Share My Location in the same list. It is separate from every app row above it, and it is what Find My uses.
• Then System Services, and the things that are not permissions at all.

System Services, at the bottom

iOS itself. Most of it earns its place: emergency calls, time zone, Find My. The entry worth opening is Significant Locations, which keeps a history of places you frequent. It is encrypted and stays on the device, and it is still a list of where you have been, and it can be cleared.

It wants Face ID first, which is a fair clue about the contents: cities, and inside each one the places you keep returning to, with dates and arrival times. It feeds Maps predictions, Photos Memories and some Siri suggestions, so clearing it makes those worse for a while. Most decide that is fine once they have read it.

The rest splits cleanly. Time zone, compass calibration, emergency calls and Find My iPhone belong on; Location-Based Suggestions and location-based Apple advertising are optional. At the bottom is Status Bar Icon, off by default, which shows the arrow when a system service reads you rather than only an app.

Where a location spoofer fits

Mostly it does not, which is why we have got this far without appearing. Permissions decide who may ask your phone where it is; a spoofer changes the answer. The permission wins: an app set to Never receives nothing regardless of what runs on your desktop, and one on While Using still only reads you while it is open. If your goal is that a specific app stops knowing where you are, the setting on this page is the better tool, and it is free.

One overlap is worth flagging. A simulated position arrives through the same Core Location path as a real one, so an app you dropped to approximate accuracy should receive a fuzzed version of the fake rather than the coordinate you set. I have not tested that on hardware, so treat it as expected behaviour and not a measured result.

Apple also renames and moves these screens between releases. The wording here matched the phone in front of me; if yours says something different, believe your phone.