iPhone navigation apps don't work in Mach-e

[mfbrown]

There is some odd interference going on. My iPhone 12 works almost all the time, but there have been a few occasions where it just seems lost. The first time I thought it might be the charge pad or my MagSafe credit card holder, but today I never took it out of my pocket until I noticed the problem and I stopped using the wallet. I checked that the location was wrong on the phone as well as CarPlay. It was wrong in Apple Maps and Google Maps which both indicated the same wrong location. I closed all apps and turned off and on my phone. It remained wrong until I reached my location and turned off the car. Shortly after turning the car off, the indicator jumped to the correct location. This is the making of a science fiction plot with unusual magnetic fields disrupting the GPS radio signal.... This was in my '23 which has the working charge pad (by the way).

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[Logal727]

I bought the Twraps MagSafe charger that was posted on the forum and I thought it solved my issues with the GPS interference with CarPlay but it came back shortly after. So this lead me to do some troubleshooting and I've found a way to mitigate it. I ended up turning off the 5G radio and using LTE on trips and I wasn't getting the messed up CarPlay navigation (car arrow starts and stops as you're driving, moves away from road, etc). So this seems to fix the issue mostly. Definitely give it a try, and I also highly recommend the Twraps charger!

 

[astrorob]

It was wrong in Apple Maps and Google Maps which both indicated the same wrong location.

if this happens again, try using the app called GPSDiagnostic. it will give you a bunch of technical info about how many satellites the phone can see and what the signal strength is. might be interesting to see what's going on when the phone can't get a fix. the app might be a little dated, but it still seems to work.

i think the app might have an in-app purchase to unlock but i just looked at the app store and it says that right now the in-app purchase is free, so you might check it out before that expires.

maybe there are other apps like this that are newer.

 

[astrorob]

today CarPlay apple maps were really bad here in the east bay. it's raining pretty hard. i opened gpsdiagnostic and i could see that the signal strength bars for all satellites were in the orange area. the error bars were +/- 120 feet at one point, with the fix getting worse and better continuously.

i think in general these navigation apps don't take the GPS fix as gospel and also rely on some heuristics to figure out where you are and what direction you are going. they probably also take an average of the GPS location over some small time window. if they didn't do these things, you'd probably find your location pip jumping all over the map all the time. in this case apple maps latched onto a street that runs parallel to the one we were on and didn't want to let go. this is the kind of thing you don't notice until it doesn't work right.

it could be that google's heuristics are better. i tend to use apple maps so i'd have to make a concerted effort to try google maps next time the weather is bad.

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