What happens when you turn off location services for an app?
Your phone knows where you are, constantly. It uses GPS, cell tower triangulation, and Wi-Fi signals to figure out your location with impressive accuracy. Every app you install gets the chance to ask for this information. But what actually happens when you say “no” to location access, or when you go into your phone’s settings and toggle it off for a specific app? The answer isn’t just “the app can’t see where you are.” It’s more interesting and more important for your privacy than that.
How apps use your location
Before we talk about turning location off, let’s understand what apps actually do with this data. Some apps obviously need location: maps need to know where you are to navigate, weather apps use it to show local forecasts, and ride-sharing apps need your coordinates to send a car to you.
But plenty of other apps ask for location and use it in ways you might not expect. Social media apps use location to tag posts or suggest local friends. Retailers use it to send you notifications when you walk near their store. Fitness trackers log your location to map your runs. Even flashlight apps have requested location at various points, sometimes out of habit and sometimes for data they sell.
The data is valuable. Advertisers want to know where you go. Retailers want to understand foot traffic. Apps want to know your movements over time. That’s why the permission is asked so often and why you should care about turning it off.
What happens when you turn it off
When you deny location access to an app or revoke it after granting it, the app immediately loses the ability to query your device’s location. On iOS, the app gets a denial response if it tries to ask for location data. On Android, the behavior is similar: the app gets back null or zero coordinates. Either way, the app can’t know where you are.
But here’s what’s crucial: the app doesn’t always know that you’ve denied it deliberately. Some apps handle this gracefully and just work without location. Others throw an error, nag you with a popup asking you to turn location back on, or refuse to function at all. A navigation app without location is useless. A camera app without location? It’ll work fine; it just won’t tag your photos with coordinates.
The operating system enforces this at a system level. Your phone’s location hardware—including the GPS chip, the cellular modem that triangulates towers, and the Wi-Fi scanner—can still work. But there’s a layer between the apps and that hardware. When you deny permission, that layer blocks the request. The app never touches your actual location.
The privacy win
This is where the real benefit lies. Location data is deeply personal. It reveals patterns about your life: where you live, where you work, where you pray or get medical care, what bars you frequent, and what protests you attend. All of this can be inferred from location tracking.
When you deny location access, you’re preventing the app from collecting that data at all. It can’t sell it, can’t use it for targeted ads, and can’t store it. The data simply doesn’t exist. This is more powerful than encryption or anonymization after the fact. Prevention is better than damage control.
The catch is that your app data collected before you turned off location is still there. Turning off location permissions doesn’t retroactively delete the location history an app already gathered. It just stops the tracking going forward.
What breaks, and what doesn’t
The practical impact depends entirely on what the app does. Maps and navigation apps become nearly useless without location. They can show you maps, but they can’t tell you where you are on them. Ride-sharing apps will ask you to manually enter your pickup location instead of detecting it automatically.
Weather apps can work with a manual zip code, but they lose the convenience of automatic detection. Photo apps lose geotagging. Dating apps lose location-based matching. Social media apps lose the ability to tag your location in posts or show your followers where you are.
But most apps work fine. A messaging app doesn’t need location. A note-taking app doesn’t need it. A to-do app doesn’t need it. Some apps will nag you to turn location back on, hoping you’ll relent. Others won’t mention it at all.
On iOS, you have a middle ground: “Allow Once” or “Allow While Using App” versus “Always.” If you choose “While Using,” the app only gets location when you’re actively using it, not when it’s in the background. This is important for apps that genuinely need location but don’t need to track you at all times.
Background location tracking
This deserves its own mention because it’s where privacy gets really important. Some apps request “Always” access to location, which means they can track you even when the app is closed. This is useful for navigation apps that need to know if you’ve arrived at your destination, or fitness apps tracking a long run in the background.
But it’s also useful for apps that want to track your movements over time without your active knowledge. An advertising company using a free app to follow you around the city has tremendous value.
When you turn off location permissions entirely, you block this. An app can’t track you in the background if it has no location access. On the flip side, if you do grant “Always” access, be aware that the app is literally always watching. Check back periodically and revoke it if you change your mind.
Battery considerations
Enabling location services does drain battery, especially GPS, which is more power-hungry than cell tower triangulation. But turning off location for individual apps doesn’t actually improve your battery much. The location hardware itself is still on (if you’ve allowed it for other apps or for system services like Find My). The battery drain comes from the hardware running, not from one app accessing it.
Where you’ll see real battery savings is if you turn off location services entirely on your phone. But that’s a more drastic step and affects everything.
How to actually do it
On most phones, you can manage location in a few places. Go to Settings, find Location or Privacy, and you’ll see a list of apps with their permission status. You can toggle any app off. You can also grant “Always,” “While Using,” or “Never” for more granular control.
The good news is that you don’t need to untrust the app by uninstalling it. You can keep using it normally and just deny location. The operating system handles the rest.
The bottom line
Turning off location for an app is one of the easiest privacy wins available on a smartphone. It costs you almost nothing in terms of functionality for most apps, and it prevents the app from collecting deeply personal data about your movements and patterns.
You should be liberal about doing this. Grant location only to apps that genuinely need it for their core function, and even then, prefer “While Using” over “Always.” Review your location permissions every few months; apps change over time, and what made sense to grant last year might not make sense now.
Your location is valuable. Don’t give it away carelessly.