In this tutorial, we look at how to pause location services on iPhones. Please be aware that this tutorial is for iOS 16, and while the process will be extremely similar for older iOS versions, it will differ slightly.
How to Pause Location Services on an iPhones
Before we look at how to pause location services on iPhone, we’re going to look at exactly what location services are and what they do.
What are Location Services?
Location services allow Apple, third-party applications, and websites to use the current location of your iPhone to provide location-based services. Location services use GPS and Bluetooth, crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspots, and cell tower locations to determine the approximate location of your device.
There are other benefits as well to enabling location services, but the most important feature that it enables is Emergency Calls and SOS support. This will allow the location of your iPhone to be sent to emergency services and emergency contacts. To view the entire list of features that are enabled with location services, please view this article from Apple.
How to Pause Location Services on iPhone
If you’d like to turn off or pause location services, follow the instructions below. As mentioned above, the process will be slightly different if you aren’t using iOS 16.
1. Open the Settings Application on your iPhone, then select Privacy & Security.
2. Select the Location Services heading to access the location service settings.
3. To disable location services, disable the Location Services option.
Location Services for Apps
While disabling location services for everything will work if you truly want to disable all location services, simply adjusting application-specific settings may be a better choice. Due to some of the great benefits that location services offer like emergency calls and SOS support, disabling location services will remove all of these benefits.
However, if you were to simply adjust application-specific settings, you’ll have the benefit of knowing exactly what is/isn’t allowed to access your location. It’s a granular way of managing location services and is beneficial in many circumstances.
To adjust the application-specific location settings, select an application, then modify the permissions. The settings changed will only impact that individual application!
Conclusion: How To Pause Location Services on iPhones
This tutorial looked at how to pause location services on iPhones. The process on how to pause location services on iPhones is extremely straightforward, but it’s important to understand exactly what pausing location services will do. There are many applications that won’t function as expected by disabling location services, so limiting the permissions on an application-specific level is the best route to take.
However, disabling location services is an option as well and will ensure that no location-specific data is transferred. I am hopeful that this article helps you understand the reasoning behind the location services feature on iPhones and how Apple apps, third-party apps, and websites can use iPhone location services.
Thanks for checking out the tutorial on how to pause location services on iPhones. If you have any questions on how to pause location services on iPhones, please leave them in the comments! We will also be posting multiple mobile-application-specific tutorials, so please check out some of our other tutorials!