I’m pretty sure this isn’t the case, but I thought I’d check to make sure. I set up a VPN on my phone and my wife’s (both Samsung GS5). My wife has reported that her GPS doesn’t work while the VPN is on, but as soon as she turns it off, GPS works again. I have not had this issue on my phone, but I was wondering if anyone else had seen this, or had any ideas? My gut says they’re unrelated (indeed, when I tested her phone I was unable to reproduce the problem).
I guess it depends what she means by “doesn’t work”. Does it show her in the wrong location, not follow her movements, or give her an error saying it can’t find her location? Is it in Google maps, or other apps? The actual GPS system in the phone should be completely unaffected by your data network, but as far as my limited understanding goes many apps use other methods than GPS to determine location, or switch to these modes when you’re indoors and GPS is unavailable, or when the battery is low. For mobile devices I think it mostly checks for your nearest cell tower or nearby wifi, which I wouldn’t have thought would be affected by vpn. If you’re on a desktop and ask Google maps to zoom in on your location though, it’ll generally use your ip address. If you’re using a vpn it’ll take you to the approximate location of your exit node, if you’re on a work network you’ll likely find yourself at your company HQ or data centre.
I’d first long-press the location button and see what it’s set to (you have options to either use both GPS and network, just network or just GPS) and then see if there are any similar settings within the apps she’s using which might be using her ip address rather than the GPS to estimate location.
I’m by no means an expert though, so someone will hopefully correct me if I’m talking nonsense.
Thank you so much for your detailed response. I’ll dig a little deeper, but it sounds like it just can’t get a fix on her location. If it’s using the data network, I would have expected it to use the exit node’s location, & she would have reported that. She was just using the Maps app (stock Google app)