Why is my iPhone location wrong?

Two things cause most of it. Either iOS handed the app a position it had already saved, or iOS worked your position out from the Wi-Fi networks around you rather than from satellites. Neither is a fault, and neither announces itself.

A phone insisting you are somewhere you are not is annoying in a specific way, because there is no error message to read. It just quietly shows the wrong thing. Here is what is usually going on, roughly in order of how often it is the answer.

Work out which kind of wrong it is first

One question sorts the rest of this page in half: is it wrong in one app, or wrong everywhere?

• One app is wrong, Maps is right. A permission or refresh problem inside that app. The phone’s positioning is fine.
• Everything is wrong by about the same amount. Positioning itself: sky view, Wi-Fi, or a fix that has not refreshed.
• Everything is wrong, by a lot, somewhere you have never been. Usually the inherited Wi-Fi address below. It feels the most like a fault and is the least like one.
• Right on your phone, wrong on somebody else’s screen. A reporting problem rather than a GPS one, covered below.

Then look at the circle around the blue dot in Maps. That circle is iOS stating in metres how confident it is: a wide one means the phone is guessing broadly and saying so, a tight one centred on the wrong building means something else is going on. How accurate is iPhone GPS covers what to expect where.

A cached fix

iOS keeps your last known position and hands that out immediately while it works on a fresh one. This is good behaviour: it means an app can show you something instantly instead of a spinner. It is also why you sometimes see a location from an hour ago. If the app never requests a fresh reading, or requests only a coarse one, the stale value is what stays on screen.

Apps also choose how hard to ask. One can request a coarse position, which iOS answers from Wi-Fi or the cache without waking the GPS chip, or subscribe to significant location changes, which only fires once you have moved a meaningful distance. It is also why Find My and Maps disagree on the same phone at the same moment: Maps is being looked at, so it asks for a fresh precise fix, while Find My shows the last position the device reported.

Fix: open Maps and tap the arrow to centre on yourself. That requests a precise fresh fix and updates the cache everything else reads from.

Wi-Fi positioning, and inherited addresses

Indoors, GPS often cannot see enough sky, so iOS positions you from the Wi-Fi networks around you instead. Those networks resolve to wherever they were last observed. It is fast and usually accurate to a building.

What sits behind the guess is a map of routers rather than streets, built up over years from phones noting which networks are audible where. Excellent in a dense neighbourhood, thin in a new development, and always slightly out of date.

It also produces the strangest failure in this list. If a router near you was mapped at its owner’s previous address and then physically moved, your phone can confidently place you at that old address. Nothing is broken; the map behind the guess is simply out of date.

A personal hotspot is the same problem with the router in your bag. How long any of it takes to correct itself we cannot tell you: Apple does not publish how that database is maintained, and there is no way to inspect it from outside.

Fix: turn Wi-Fi on even if you do not join a network, and go near a window. Both help.

Precise Location is off

iOS 14 added a per-app switch between precise and approximate location. Approximate rounds you to an area a few kilometres across, deliberately. If one app is wrong and everything else is right, check this first.

Approximate does not scatter your position at random, it reports a region, and iOS refreshes that region far less often than a real fix, so the wrong answer looks stable and self-assured for hours. And an app set to While Using rather than Always cannot update once you switch away from it, which people describe as the app freezing. It did not freeze, it was told to stop. iPhone location permissions covers each setting.

Fix: Settings, Privacy and Security, Location Services, pick the app, and turn Precise Location on.

Low Power Mode

Low Power Mode reduces background work, and location refresh is part of what it reduces. Positions update less often and lag behind you.

The tell is specific: right whenever you look at your own phone, wrong whenever anybody else checks on you. Foreground requests still work, background updating is what gets throttled. Background App Refresh switched off does the same thing, without a yellow battery icon to remind you.

Date and time set manually

An uncommon one worth knowing because it looks unrelated. GPS is fundamentally a timing system, and a clock that is wrong by enough will produce a position that is wrong by a lot.

The milder version is commoner. You travel, the clock is right but the timezone was pinned by hand months ago, and apps that reason from your local time start disagreeing with apps that reason from your coordinates.

Fix: Settings, General, Date and Time, and turn Set Automatically on.

When it is only wrong on somebody else’s screen

Same symptom, different failure. Your own Maps is right, and Find My or Life360 shows your family an address you left an hour ago. Nothing about the positioning is broken. The position never got out.

The causes are mundane: no usable signal when it tried, Low Power Mode, the app set to While Using instead of Always, or the phone being off, leaving the other person looking at a last known location. Find My keeps showing the last place it heard from, which is why a phone that ran out of battery reads as still at the office rather than unknown.

Fix: nothing on the viewer’s end helps. It has to be sorted out on the reporting phone.

Fixes that get recommended and mostly do not help

Search this problem and you get a list that is part harmless, part actively unhelpful.

• Turning Wi-Fi off. The instinct is that Wi-Fi caused the wrong position, so remove it. Indoors that makes the answer worse, because Wi-Fi was the only thing holding the estimate near your building.
• Reset Location & Privacy. It does clear location state, and it revokes every location permission on the phone, so you spend the next while granting them back one at a time.
• Reset Network Settings. The same trade, and it forgets every Wi-Fi password you have saved.
• Calibrating the compass. The figure-of-eight motion corrects heading, the direction the phone is pointing. It has nothing to do with where the phone thinks it is.

Restarting is the exception. It is quick, it costs nothing, and it clears a stuck fix often enough to be worth doing first.

Actual hardware, last

Genuine GPS hardware faults exist and are rare. Before concluding that, check the phone is not in a metal case, that you have tried outdoors, and that Location Services is on at all. A hardware fault does not usually produce a plausible wrong address; it produces no fix.

The pattern to look for is a phone that is wrong everywhere, including outside under open sky, and never converges: the accuracy circle stays enormous and waiting does not shrink it. A phone that is accurate on the pavement and hopeless in the kitchen has nothing wrong with it.

Where we come into this, which is barely

We make a location spoofer, and almost nothing above is a problem we solve. If your phone has the wrong place by accident, you want the right one back, not a different wrong one. The one overlap is the note below.