iPhone 8 GPS problems

Try as I might, have not been able to get any tech journal to show any interest in running an article on this issue, they seem to care more about new Animojis...

Anyway i waited well over a month for “engineering” to respond and finally received a request that they require me to submit even more logs! What a complete waste of time.

Digelec,

Somewhere back along this thread, a GPS testing app was mentioned. You could try that.

DublinTimo,

Good to hear your repair worked on the iPhone 6. Unfortunately, many people replaced iPhone8s and iPhoneXs but couldn't solve their problem, so I guess repairs aren't the solution in many/most cases.

However, I wonder if all their replacements/repairs by Apple merely amounted to reissuing/reinstalling the same badly designed GPS device. Did you install a "non-Apple" one?

Well in that case, I am completely lost (pardon the pun 😉)

Perhaps Apple is reducing GPS sensitivity deliberately so we don't notice how bad their Maps app is!

Just joking! 😁

- mind you, according to Apple Maps, one building exists in two separate locations in my neighborhood!

Definitely at the laugh or cry phase.

Expletives get substituted by X's, so could be a three-letter expletive directed at me (or possibly Apple). He could be just calling me an "a--s--s" because he didn't think my corny joke was funny 😉. I don't know about him, but I was just venting my frustration that this problem is still not fixed.

Update: I just noticed that his post arrived in my mail alerts. It was not offensive. It was not recommending we sign up for a poll. I see nothing contravening the rules of this forum in his post. I would be very interested to know from Richard (or from the censor - big chance of that!) why his post got removed/blocked. Odd that it got replaced by xxx. Other posts from other contributors that get blocked don't appear at all in this thread with or without x's - I only see the blocked posts in my mail alerts. Very mysterious. Perhaps Richard deleted his own text for some reason?

Here are the rules if anyone wants to check them

Apple Support Communities Use Agreement

Yes, a lot of this cens0rship is happening here... I agree with you, the "X" thing is weird. I hope he posts back to explain.

His post was basically saying that he had a problem with his iPhone 6, started taking it apart but did not replace any parts, just put the thing back together and that it solved his problem.

So his view points not to a defective part but to a bad connection between components that was fixed by just taking the phone apart and putting it back together.

In my case I know that my problem was fixed after I replaced the parts. But maybe the parts were sound and it's only the unscrewing and unplugging of parts, then re-screwing and re-plugging of the parts that fixed the problem. Maybe the parts were fine, I'll never know.

Now both his phone and mine are model 6. So maybe this has nothing to do with your model 8 problems.

In our case it shows that the problem was hardware only.

Thanks, I checked out the other thread you linked to. You seem to be onto something. I wonder though, why some people cannot resolve the problem even after returning their phones? Perhaps because they get another flawed chipset that gets easily melted/dislodged/whatever when they update to the latest iOS? Pretty pathetic if that is the situation. I will be super careful with my new phone i.e. re-installing it gradually and using the GPS apps sparingly. Sigh...

For me, it hasn't. I have very similar issues with iPhone 7.

I use it to track my runs, and since installing iOS 11 the GPS is consistently tracking between 5% and 20% less than the actual distance. Today I did a long run with iOS 11.3 installed and it tracked 20% less.

Prior to iOS 11 the track was very accurate and consistent. Since installing iOS 11 (and with every single update after that) the track is much less accurate, skips turns, etc.

I suffered for 3 months with an X and BS from Apple and made various posts about it. I eventually swapped for a new iPhone 7 and the GPS works much better. I can now use it as I would expect when walking. The whole thing is a farce and I’ll be very careful buying a first generation device again. I miss the bigger screen on the X and the second camera. I don’t miss Face. iD at all, Touch ID is faster and way more accurate.

Corangar, How can you test GPS when inside a store?

Were you very close to the window?

Apple Maps may been able to base your position on GPS initially but then become less accurate due to poor reception inside, which would have forced it to rely on only Wifi and cell-tower triangulation.

Yeah, I was also wondering about the introduction of the Galileo and/or QZSS services.

Might be a hardware flaw that emerged when those capabilities were included in the iPhone 8 and X.

Or the software can't handle different satellites properly.

Would be interesting to compare with an Android that used the same satellites...

I replaced my iPhone X a couple of weeks ago and did no restore it from my old backup just to be safe.

It was okay until today when the xxxx thing started acting up again.

The GPS worked eventually but it couldn't find my location for about 10 minutes!

I will test it again tomorrow if possible.

Since we're talking about the GPS tech behind it, here's an interesting observation if anyone can benefit from it. Compare the specification of these two phones:

iPhone 6s - Technical Specifications - Apple

iPhone X - Technical Specifications - Apple

Both 6S and X (and everything in-between) have "Assisted GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and QZSS", while 5S & SE do not.

I have never not experienced this location issue on a 6S device, not once. And this goes for our personal 6S and all of the store tested ones.

Here's where it gets interesting though. Look at the snapshot of 6S specs from September 2017: https://web.archive.org/web/20170912193802/https://www.apple.com/iphone-6s/specs /

There is no mention of Galileo and QZSS back then. Even if this was retroactively added via a software update, for whatever reason the 6S doesn't have any issues with Galileo and QZSS.

Someone says in this thread that Galileo is backwards compatible so it may be possible that it is indeed a software update: Iphone compatibility with Galileo satellites. I'm thinking Apple would probably have to put a disclaimer* for legal reason on the 6S specification page were it exclusive to the new hardware as well.

Either way, I'll try to confirm whether our 6S supports Galileo if any app like GPS Diagnostics can tell me such information.

corangar wrote:

I have never not experienced this location issue on a 6S device, not once. And this goes for our personal 6S and all of the store tested ones.

I've never seen or experienced it on an iPhone 8+ or iPhone X, so there still seems to be some other factor involved.

@AppleQer Don't know what confused you but I meant what I wrote. We have a 6S (my previous phone) and I have never experienced such GPS issues with it. My 8+ which got replaced multiple times and then refunded, and now the X all experience the same GPS issues. Even today, I use that very same 6S every time as a baseline when comparing the phones and the GPS on the 6S is always working well and does not experience anything not even close to 8/X issues.