iPhone 8 GPS problems

Just went out a few miles drive to test the replacement phone. Drove over a mile with the phone not on the magnetic mount and it worked perfectly on waze and apple maps. On the way back i put it on the magnetic mount and low and behold waze had red No GPS error and apple maps location was way off and wouldnt right itself. I dont think new phones are supposed to be bothered my magnets but thats seems to be the case for me. I know that some people on this thread have it happening when walking or on a non magnetic mount and i hope you find a solution but for others out there using these mounts, try taking it off. Im gonna buy a cradle mount, too much hassle to get phone replaced so im taking the easy option.

After trying all the tricks mentioned here and in other threads to no avail, I restored iOS 11.1 on my iPhone 8+ and set up as a new device. Installed only Waze, Google maps and GPS diagnostics apps. I used it for most of the day and still experienced the erratic behavior while trying to navigate, best indicator was Waze intermittently showing the message in red font about not being able to find a GPS satellite signal. I concluded it was a hardware issue so I made a Genius Bar reservation. Diagnostics did not show anything unusual. The Genius swapped the device (yes, for a white box unit which I hope is indeed new and not refurbished) and the GPS is so far working great even after I restored all my settings and data from back up. It’s possible that some devices with marginal GPS units like mine will be fixed with different settings via software in a future iOS release but I was not willing to wait for that. So I can confirm I had a defective GPS unit in my iPhone 8+ and getting a warranty replacement was the solution.

Hey so I just wanted to give everyone my story about this and a solution I found. My fiance and I had Verizon with iphone 7's up until December 28, 2017. We jumped ship for Sprint (probably the worst decision we ever made) for an iphone 8 (me) and an iphone X (for her). We got our phones in Virginia while visiting family and drove back to South Carolina. We had taken my car (2012 honda civic) and i usually rely on google maps for traffic/gps. No issues whatsoever.

When we get back to South Carolina, the fiance had to go to work (she's an EMT for the county) and that evening she called me panicking out on her way to work that google maps wasn't working at all. Couldn't locate her, kept jumping around, etc. I tell her we will call Apple about it. I get online after and i find this thread and hows its a pretty big issue.

I called apple support the next day and the guy acts like he has never heard of this. Walks me through resetting everything, gets remote access to my phone to check some stuff. Tells us to try it again. We go out in her car to make sure we test all the variables. Still acting up. I try my phone...that worked perfectly...and i get the same issue. Makes me think it's something in the car. Noisy power supply on the radio interfering with the phone, etc..something.

She goes to work that evening, same thing. By this time she's furious that we paid $1000 for a phone and its totally unusable. The iphone 7 worked flawlessly in the car. She needs gps to help with finding people's houses/traffic updates. I pull out an old iphone 4, download an offline google map to help her out. No traffic updates, but she gets directions now. That works.

Flash forward a couple weeks. We go to the Apple store downtown (Charleston) and of course the guy wants to replace it...not with a brand new phone, but a "manufacturer refurbished" phone, which i was blown away. But whatever. I took video from my phone showing the issue on her phone all the way to the store.

He tells us its going to work now for sure, blah blah blah. We get out to the car, plug in our home address on google maps. Still messed up. It's ridiculous. By this time I'm getting furious. So i decide we are going to kill power to the radio to test it. We get home and i pull out the owner's manual for the diagram for the fuse box.

I'm looking at the diagram and i see there's a fuse for OnStar. I begin thinking that maybe the OnStar is interferring with it (it has gps, calling, etc..) So i decide i'm going to start with that. I pull the fuse, we start the car and i verify the OnStar module on the ceiling isn't lit up with an led.

We decide to go for a test drive. It follow us the entire way, no issues whatsoever. I tried it on my phone that screwed up too, flawless.

TL;DR Pull the fuse for the OnStar module in your car if it has this. Worked for my issue.

The issue I had was actually localized to my Subaru Infotainment unit (2015 Subaru with Nav). Since it has a built-in GPS (albeit somewhat less than desirable) it disables the GPS on the iPhone when plugged into the USB port on the radio. The problem is that the only way for the Subaru unit to fully control the Pandora App is to be plugged into USB on the radio. I validated this behavior is happening across any and all iOS devices. Android is able to control all of it via Bluetooth. Short answer, I will be shopping for a CarPlay Certified aftermarket unit.

To prove the point there is a great $2.99 app called GPS Diagnostic. Shows the Satellite coverage and communications between location services. Helped me narrow it all down. I just came back from the Subaru dealer and tried a couple different cars on the lot with the same radio, with the exact same result.

Hey there! Are you using any sort of metal/magnetic mounts or cases? Apple has stated that with the iPhone 8/X, since there is a pretty large magnet under the rear glass for wireless charging, to stay away from any and all metal casings or car mounts as it can permanently or temporarily throw off the compasses calibration. If you’re not, I would definitely make sure there is no metal around the device while in your pocket/purse or at home, and under location services->system services, make sure your compass calibration, WiFi and cellular networking, routing and traffic, and even setting time zone are turned to “On” as all of these features contribute to successful navigation via Apple Maps and other third party navigation apps.

I got on the phone with Apple support. They had me go to settings privacy and go to the Maps app. It was not indicating on that app whether it should be allowed to see my location at all. Nothing was checked. I checked while using this app and as for right now my problem appears to be fixed. I am testing it now but I’m hopeful that was it.

Very, very similar issues here. I bought the iPhone 8 and have had a heck of a time getting an accurate GPS signal. Waze/Gmaps would start out fine, and then quickly lose me about two minutes into the drive. The signal would periodically get picked back up, only to promptly be lost again. Closing the apps and restarting periodically got the GPS going again, but not before quickly crapping out. Needless to say, this is no way to navigate to a place you haven't been to before, and completely unacceptable for a brand-new phone. I spent plenty of time on the phone with Apple tech support -- who were helpful and sympathetic -- but we exhausted every option (reset settings, location, LTE, data and talk, bluetooth, airplane mode, wipe the phone and stat anew) and absolutely nothing worked. They sent me to the Apple store for a replacement device.

Lo and behold, the even newer iPhone 8 still seemed to be giving me problems with accurately finding my location while in my car on GPS. I couldn't believe my bad luck, and started wondering if somehow it had something to do with my car, or where my phone was positioned in my car, because I'd also used the GPS with my running apps and hadn't had any issues.

So this might be the strangest part: I've been using an Alisky car phone mount, and I finally took the phone out of the mount during my drive yesterday, and suddenly GPS appeared to be working again just fine. It navigated me all the way home, and so then I tried it again -- outside the phone cradle -- and while the GPS seemed to lose me once or twice, it also picked me back up within about 30 seconds instead of 5 minutes, and fully navigated my entire route.

I at a bit of a loss to explain this -- the rational person in me can't fathom how a piece of plastic could have any effect on a GPS signal. Is it possible that the GPS chip in the iPhone 8 was moved in such a way that depending on the position of my iPhone in the Alisky car phone mount it could actually block the GPS signal? Seems preposterous, I know, but I am really coming up short for an explanation as to why the GPS has mostly worked since I removed my phone from the car mount. Could it be the combination of the silicon Apple-brand case I use plus the plastic Alisky holder is somehow interfering with the GPS triangulation?

I've got some more experimenting to do before declaring this now 2nd iPhone 8's GPS to be busted, but I'd be curious as to whether anyone else has had a similar experience.

Or do we all think this is an iOS issue? If so, I don't know how Apple hasn't addressed this yet as it seems like a fair amount of users are having this same GPS problem.

OK so I have kind of an insane update to report. I've continued to test my iPhone 8 in hopes of isolating what the problem is, and I think I may have finally found it. Initially I was suspicious of my car mount, and whether it was somehow blocking the GPS chip's signal, but ultimately this made no sense.

Still, I couldn't help but wonder whether it had something to do with my car, or the positioning of my mount and/or phone, considering that GPS seemed to work fine so long as the phone wasn't being cradled in the mount.

In the middle of a yet another dropped GPS signal, I decided to turn the phone on its side to landscape -- BOOM it IMMEDIATELY picked the signal back up and held it for the entire rest of my trip. Tried it again this morning -- continued to drop the signal while positioned upright, but turn the phone on its side, and GPS works perfectly.

I would LOVE to know if anyone else has this experience. If this is an issue on more than my phone, it would appear Apple has a serious gyroscope/accelerometer issue on its hands with the iPhone 8 and the GPS chipset.

Hey everyone. I MAY have found the root of this issue, and it MAY indirectly tie into people saying if they position their phones in a specific orientation in their phone holders the GPS works.

I had the benefit of being stuck in traffic tonight while having Waze up. As usual my GPS randomly cut out for no reason. I took my phone out of its holder to inspect it, and instantly I had a GPS signal. I then returned it back into the holder and it would lose GPS after a few moments. EVERY SINGLE TIME I took it out of the holder it would get a GPS signal within one second and stay connected, and EVERY SINGLE TIME I put it back into the holder it would lose it.

My phone holder does not use magnets, it's a simple window mounted unit, that I think is nothing but plastic, but may have metal components inside (spings, etc...)

When people run into this issue, please remove your phone from your holders and LET US KNOW if you regain your GPS signal.

If you look back a couple pages, I came up with the same conclusion as you, in regards to my car interfering with the GPS. My test was when I was parked and didn't have GPS signal, as soon as I turned my car off, within 10 seconds the phone would fully regain GPS. I would then turn the car back on, and pretty quickly I'd lose the GPS signal again. The best app to test this on is Waze, because it'll show you whether there is a signal or not.

Beup, if you can leave your phone on where you would normally keep it during driving, and test this, we could be on to something. Also, what kind of car are you driving? I have a 13' Hyundai Sonata that causes my issues. I've noticed this issue isn't present in all cars, and my GPS works quite well then.

OK, first, I have an older (2009) Mazda 6, that I have been using successfully with EVERY single iPhone since the iPhone 3G (the first one with a GPS receiver in it). None have experienced problems until the iPhone X (to be fair, I didn't get an iPhone 8 while waiting for the X, but I expect given this forum that has the exact same problem). I also after recent software updates no longer see a floating dot miles from where I am, nor have I seen any Waze directions telling me I have miles still to drive home while sitting in my driveway, but when driving around where I don't care about using Waze, the closest resolution I've seen on my phone was 27 feet. Not great for a device costing well over $1000. My fix, simple, I bought a Garmin GLO. Now I have exact GPS location the second I turn it on. I shouldn't have to buy a $99 GPS receiver to fix an $1149 phone but I did. And even better it gives me a much higher accuracy when mapping my hikes then the built in GPS ever did.

My expectation is it's the new GPS receiver in the X (and 8/8 Plus) that is the problem. They added Galileo support (as well as QZSS) to the receiver on the new phones, and probably didn't do the same kind of interference testing they had done before (or they needed to improve reception and hence increased sensitivity to noise).

Once this whole thing gets sorted (if it gets sorted), I may swap out my X for a "new" one, but in the meantime I don't have the time to try phone after phone after phone and have them fail, when it is ONLY the new phones having the problem. I just hope Apple simply states what the problem is someday, instead of the continuing deafening silence.

I started experiencing the issue shortly after the upgrade to iOS11

I tried everything suggested on this and many other forums, including slapping the phone against my palm to "reset the accelerators". Strangely enough this did seem to work consistently, but the issue would re-appear a few minutes later.

One day while driving, I asked my wife to slap the phone because I could not, and she then made an (now obvious) comment. "It seems to work the moment we take it away from the car's center console.

I tested this, and as long as my wife holds the phone in her hand in the middle of the car, it keeps working without issues. When we place it back in the cradle mounted on the dash (and tested windscreen) it looses GPS connectivity. This is also the case for other navigation app like Google Maps.

Hope this helps

I just wanted to chime in here as I had success in solving this over the past few days.

I've been following this thread for a few weeks now and having experienced this issue with my iPhone 8 Plus since day 1 back in September 2017, I didn't hold out much hope in seeing it resolved as several people have mentioned that they're on their fourth of fifth iPhone 8/8 Plus/X replacement. I don't have a Sonata and have this issue when walking around, in an open field, on a clear day, with nothing between me and the sky. I did use the GPS Diagnostics app that was suggested and it was very interesting to see that my phone rarely ever used GPS - it always was using Cellular/Bluetooth/Wifi to locate me. When it did use GPS, it wouldn't last for a second before reverting back to the latter again.

Anyway, I made a Genius Bar appointment, showed the results from the app along with two videos - one from my iPhone 8 Plus and one from my wife's iPhone SE. Both were screen recordings and adequately showed the issue whilst we were on a walk - my wife's position was excellent whilst mine was drifting up to 2 miles away!

I was given a replacement phone which I set up and I'm happy to say that the problem is now resolved. The GPS Diagnostics app says I'm using GPS most of the time and satellite coverage is almost always excellent. Any map app can get an near instant lock on me and I've been able to use Waze without issue for the first time since being an iPhone 8 Plus owner.

I'm aware that a lot of people have found that solving this issue isn't as straight forward as simple getting a replacement phone however, I wanted to chime in to say that if there are people watching or reading this thread and thinking that they don't have a chance of it being resolved, please don't give up yet! If you haven't already, book a Genius Bar appointment and see if you can get a replacement unit. If possible, take evidence with you as I'm sure it expedited the process I went through.

Good luck to everyone in seeing this fixed.

Mikeluca67

Don't trust the Tech diagnostics - I don't see how they can test your GPS chips if the phone is indoors at the time.

Backup your phone to iTunes, do a factory reset while plugged into iTunes for the latest iOS (not through the phones internal settings, which will reset you to whatever iOS was installed at the factory), and test out the GPS using Apple Maps. It won't take you long and you would have your entire phone backed up to iTunes anyway. If that test fails, take the phone in that initialized state to a Genius Bar, and get a replacement phone or replace the GPS chip. You may have to demonstrate the GPS failure outside, but I doubt it (I didn't have to). I am not sure, but the Genius Bar people seem aware there is a hardware problem. Good luck!

Testing and replacement are discussed on page 38 of this thread: Re: GPS not working after update to IOS11