Google in Safari for iPhone and iPad asks you for your location every time you use it these days. We show you how you stop it from doing that with a permanent solution!
I am not sure when this happened exactly, but some time ago Google for Safari on iPhone & iPads became a bit of an… annoying experience. Every time you would search for something, Safari (on behalf of Google) would ask for your location. This literally happens every time you use Google on mobile Safari these days. It’s annoying, and there’s no immediately apparent way to deal with it.
Thankfully, we’ve discovered a quick and easy way to ensure Google stops asking for your location in Safari for iPhone and iPad. It comes via reddit user westongallagher over on the apple subreddit. Here it goes:
Step 1: Launch Safari on your iPhone or iPad.
Step 2: Tap on “Use precise location” at the bottom.
Step 3: Tap on “OK” in the pop-up box that shows up. This is the last time Google / Safari are going to annoy you about your location.
That’s it! Now Google knows your location more precisely. I’d wager this is street-level precision going on, since Google came quite close.
Related: Redirect Cortana searches to Google in Chrome
Why did Google ask for my location repeatedly in the first place?
That’s a good question, dear reader. The way location requests in websites in Safari works is thus: websites are supposed to ask you for your location every time they need it. On desktop macOS Safari, you can have the browser remember your preference for up to one day. The next day, if you go to the same website again, it’ll ask you for your location again.
It’s annoying for the user, but it’s also a lot safer. I’m a user experience design enthusiast myself, so I personally feel they could improve it significantly. How? Well, how about Safari smartly increasing the maximum time it can remember the decision for? For example, I use Google Maps quite regularly. If I’ve been visiting it and granting location access so many times, chances are I trust the website. So, Safari increase it from “one day” to “one week” up to “one month”. That would reduce annoyance levels quite a bit.
So what do you think? Let us know in the comments section below. We’re especially curious about the solution we shared above. It is confirmed working for me on an iPhone 6S running iOS 9.3.4.