Pokemon Go GPS Cheat (If You Don’t Fear Getting Banned)

Pokemon Go inherits a certain vulnerability to GPS location spoofing from it’s predecessor Ingress, but also the progress that has been made in spoof detection. Since taking advantage of a game’s underlying mechanisms is part of the winner’s game, why not hook up your smartphone to Xcode and see if you can beat Niantic this time? [Dave Conroy] shows you how to play back waypoints and activate your Pokemon Go warp drive.

The hack (therefore the Monospace) is based on the developers toolkits on Android and iOS, and also the easiest way to get banned from the game. On an Android smartphone, all you really need to do is get one of the many GPS spoofing apps from the Play store, repeatedly tap About phone to activate the developer settings and select that app as GPS spoofing source there. In iOS, you can (probably) also install a spoofing app through Cydia, although the easiest way without jailbreak is creating a new iOS app in Xcode (or any iOS application you have at hand) and build it to the phone. While in debugging mode, you can then load a *.GPX-file, which is simply a text file containing GPS waypoints in the XML-based GPS Exchange Format:

<gpx>
  <name>My waypoints</name>
  <wpt lat="34.143895" lon="-118.151556">
    <name>SupplyFrame, Inc.</name>
  </wpt>
</gpx>

You can also create timed routes:

<gpx>
 <name>My tracks</name>
  <trk>
    <name>Some track</name>
    <trkseg>
      <trkpt lat="34.143657" lon="-118.152368"><time>2016-07-18T00:00:00Z</time></trkpt>
      <trkpt lat="34.144502" lon="-118.152368"><time>2016-07-18T00:01:00Z</time></trkpt>
      <trkpt lat="34.144490" lon="-118.150470"><time>2016-07-18T00:02:00Z</time></trkpt>
      <trkpt lat="34.143654" lon="-118.150455"><time>2016-07-18T00:03:00Z</time></trkpt>
    </trkseg>
  </trk>
</gpx>

The file is loaded via Product -> Debug -> Simulate Location -> Add GPX file to project, as shown in the video. This makes the waypoints or tracks available from the Simulate Location menu. From there, you then can then teleport your phone to the defined locations, or take it for a walk along the tracking points.

While the video is more a tutorial on how to get banned from the game than anything else, we’re not here to judge you if you try it. In the contrary, we’d actually love to see an implementation that catches ’em all without falling over the various strings Niantic has put in place, effectively turning GPS spoofing into a game of its own. Check out the video below to see [Dave Conroy’s] approach.

Oh, and did we mention this is probably get you banned? Can’t stress this one enough.

Filed under: nintendo hacks