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Author Topic: Location services or Find my iPhone gone insane  (Read 8565 times)

Weaver

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Location services or Find my iPhone gone insane
« on: January 05, 2018, 07:16:39 PM »

Find My iPhone has gone insane and was telling me that Mrs Weaver was in the coop or at the petrol station next door in Broadford when she was actually in the house the whole time. Now it is wrong in a different way, it is telling me she is in the middle of the sea, at the mouth of Loch Eiseort about a mile south south west of home.

Has anyone ever had this weirdness?

I can of course try rebooting it. I turned "wi-fi" off and on again to see if that would help, and that indeed did move it to a different state of wrongness five miles south of the initial wrong place, so now she is all at sea.
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andyfitter

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Re: Location services or Find my iPhone gone insane
« Reply #1 on: January 05, 2018, 07:30:52 PM »

Sounds like it has fallen back to using Cell triangulation (much less accurate, especially in remote areas) , instead of the nearby Wi-fi ssid lookup.

No idea why it might do it though. 
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Ronski

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Re: Location services or Find my iPhone gone insane
« Reply #2 on: January 05, 2018, 08:19:04 PM »

Yes I've had weirdness like that, Mrs Ronski was on the train back from London when DPD decided try and beat the train at a level crossing and lost, and thus trains were delayed.

I'd been texting her and tracking her location and she was at Sittingbourne station, anyway a while later I looked and she was at Ashford station, this totally confused me. It's 15 miles away as the crow flies, there is hills in between and no direct rail link. I have to admit I did text her and ask what she was doing at Ashford, she was most amused!

No idea how it got it so wrong, given the hills & distance and with it showing her exactly at the station I didn't think it could be cell tower triangulation getting it that far out, it's often out but not normally that far.
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Formerly restrained by ECI and ali,  now surfing along at 1147/105  ;D

Weaver

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Re: Location services or Find my iPhone gone insane
« Reply #3 on: January 05, 2018, 10:32:49 PM »

It just isn't thinking about the fact that it's connected to one of my own WAPs here at the house. I checked and it actually was connected to the WLAN before I forced it to reconnect.

Several hours later it was still floating around in the Atlantic, and a reboot of the iphone didn't fix it. Next thing to try, turn off location services and then reboot the device. After that it briefly showed the correct location, then went back to the Atlantic again. More fiddling about turning location services off and then back on again. Finally Mrs Weaver re-'shared' her location with me in Settings > Privacy > Location Settings and then it went home, according to my own iPad which was watching its location.

A thought occurred to me: it's a shame that you can't calibrate the system. When it is hoeing a device's position on the map, you should be able to move the point to the exactly correct position.
« Last Edit: January 05, 2018, 10:46:33 PM by Weaver »
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sevenlayermuddle

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Re: Location services or Find my iPhone gone insane
« Reply #4 on: January 09, 2018, 09:23:49 AM »

I have noticed same.  We also share locations on iPhones and Normally, 95% of the time, it is accurate to GPS levels.  I have used it to find her in a huge motorway service station car park before now, just by walking to the place where my own location dot on the map coincides with her dot, worked a treat.

Occasionally, it seems to become hugely inaccurate or sometimes just fails to locate at all.   I have never figured out why, but it tends to happen when the phone has been indoors for a while, and/or been stationary in same place for a while. 

Obviously, a weak GPS signal might make location less accurate.  And if the phone is not on wi fi, and is in a mobile data black spot, obviously it can’t report its location at all.   But without going into too much tedious detail, I  have analysed specific symptoms and discounted both of these explanations,  I am convinced it is just buggy.

When I track her while driving her car, it always seems totally accurate.  And I have never known either of our phones to get its own location inexplicably wrong when using maps Apps on the same device, it is just the location shared with other devices that seems occasionally to be very  wrong.
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