How to Fake a GPS Tracker Location on Your Phone

Changing the location on your iPhone or Android device involves tricking your phone into telling apps that you’re located somewhere you are not. In most cases, when you spoof your GPS location, every location-based app on your phone will be fooled.

This might seem like a weird thing to do since most of us use GPS for tasks that need our real location, like when finding directions and weather updates. However, there are legitimate reasons to change your phone's location to a fake one.

Unfortunately, faking the location on your Android or iPhone is not very straightforward. There isn’t a “fake GPS location” setting built in to either iOS or Android and neither do most apps let you spoof your location through a simple option.

Why Would You Fake Your Location?

There are lots of situations where you might set up a fake GPS location, both for fun and for other reasons.

Maybe you want to change your location so that something like a dating app thinks you’re a hundred miles away, perfect if you’re planning to move somewhere and want to get ahead of the dating game.

Spoofing your location might also come into play when using a location-based game like Pokemon GO. Instead of having to actually travel several miles away to pick up a different Pokemon type, you could trick your phone into telling Pokemon GO that you’re already there, and the game will assume your fake location is accurate.

Other reasons to set up a mock GPS location might be if you want to "travel" to Dubai and check-in to a restaurant you've never actually been to, or visit a famous landmark to trick your Facebook friends into thinking you're on an extravagant vacation.

You can also use your fake GPS location to fool your family or friends in your location-sharing app, to hide your real location from apps that request it, and even to set your real location if GPS satellites aren't doing a great job at finding it for you.

GPS Spoofing Problems

Before getting started, please know that although it can be a lot of fun to fake your location, it’s not always helpful. Plus, because GPS spoofing isn’t a built-in option, it isn’t just a click away to get it going, and location fakers don’t always work for every app that reads your location.

If you install a fake GPS location app on your phone to use it for, say, a video game, you’ll find that other apps that you want to use your real location with will also use the fake location. For example, the game might very well use your spoofed address to your advantage, but if you open your navigation app to get directions somewhere, you’ll have to either turn off the location spoofer or manually adjust your starting location.

The same is true for other things like checking in to restaurants, staying current on your family-based GPS locator, checking the weather around you, etc. If you’re tricking your location system-wide for everything on your phone, it will, obviously, affect the location in all your location-based apps.

Another important thing to know is that some apps, Pokemon GO for example, can, in some situations, detect when your location is being spoofed. Your account could be suspended or completely shut down if you try to bend the rules in apps that rely heavily on accurately pinpointing your location.

On top of the fact that some apps don’t work with a phone that has a fake location, some phones themselves simply do not support changing the location using certain methods. For example, the method below for iPhones running iOS 10 no longer works on newer versions of iOS.

Android Location Spoofing

Search for "fake GPS" on Google Play and you'll find tons of options, some free and others not, and some that require your phone to be rooted.
 

 

4. Use the back button to return to Fake GPS Free, and search for the location you want to fake on your phone. You can also double-tap any place on the map to drop the pin.
   
5. Use the play button on the bottom right corner of the map to enable the fake GPS setting. You should briefly see a message read "Fake location engaged..." appear on the bottom of the app.
   

You can close Fake GPS Free and open Google Maps or another app that uses your location to see if it has really been spoofed.

To get your real location back and disable the fake GPS location, return to the app and press the stop button on the bottom left-hand corner.