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I own an iPhone X, purchased a few months after its release (November 2017). I'm getting close to the end of my AppleCare+ window, and as such have some urgency to identifying whether the following issue is legitimate (and needs to be/can be fixed) or not. I'm not looking for support for the issue itself, but for how to identify/troubleshoot it.

The last few days, my GPS location accuracy has been ... bad. Very bad. I was driving home on Sunday, and asked Siri for directions out of the strip mall I was having lunch in back to the highway; Siri started telling me things that made no sense, multiple different sets of things, and was very far off track (and moving about wildly). My wife, who also has an iPhone X purchased at the same time on the same service, set up her directions and had no issues with drift.

The rest of the trip home I continued to experience far more frequent "course corrections" (while I was driving along a deserted freeway) than is typical - tens of corrections, even in fairly open areas, as opposed to the typical two or three. My wife's phone had nearly no issues.

I also play some location-aware games, and have had multiple instances where they were far, far worse than usual. I'm familiar with normal GPS drift, but this seems different.

Is there any way for me to identify this as an actual problem (as opposed to just normal GPS drift that I'm just noticing more for whatever reason)? An app, a log, something like that where I can either diagnose the problem or collect data on the problem so I can 1) prove if this is a problem or not, and 2) show it to Apple support so they can identify the (hardware/software) problem?

If it's relevant, the issues occurred on iOS 12.4 and iOS 13.0 (but I've since upgraded to 13.1). Never on a beta, always on release versions.

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  • There's many different answers already provided for questions about GPS accuracy and troubleshooting. Have you searched for answers already provided and tried any of the answers that helped others? That should be your first step.
    – fsb
    Sep 25, 2019 at 18:47
  • @fsb I've read the questions in the right bar here; they don't seem very useful, other than the comment that the iPhone is probably using the cell tower location not GPS (which is a valid point, but I'm not sure how that would suddenly fail.) A bit too much noise:signal ratio in the GPS questions I'm afraid...
    – Joe
    Sep 25, 2019 at 18:49
  • I should add I suppose that I've clearly rebooted my phone twice (as I installed iOS13 and iOS13.1), the first reboot didn't help, just did the second this morning so not enough time yet to know about the second. Either way - the idea here is how to troubleshoot it, not solving the problem itself.
    – Joe
    Sep 25, 2019 at 18:52
  • The answers on the right are only a small sample of info available. My goal is to point you to all the different troubleshooting methods people have already spent countless hours adding to this site. The methods you're looking for are already there and, yes, it might take some time to find it but it appears that's not what you want to do.
    – fsb
    Sep 25, 2019 at 20:03
  • Turning on your WiFi & Bluetooth help increase accuracy.
    – Theologin
    Sep 25, 2019 at 22:43

1 Answer 1

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The best bet is to take it into an Apple Store and have them run diagnostics on the device. This won't take long to do, and there'll also be a record of it on their systems.

If an Apple Store (or authorised repairer) is not convenient to you, Apple can also run diagnostics while you're on the phone to them.

Regardless, the diagnostics will identify any hardware related issues on your iPhone and that's really the best way to troubleshoot it.

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