It’s a small part of what WhatsApp does, but if you’re so inclined, you can share your location with your contacts.

It’s useful if you’re keeping tabs on a teenager, or if you want people to find you while you’re out, planning an event, or you’re lost.

It’s also useful if you have a very codependent group of friends and you need to know where everyone is at all times, in which case you should probably sit down and reevaluate your priorities.

All of that aside, if for whatever reason you want to fake your location, TechJunkie can show you how.

Before we go into it, though, here’s what you need to know about sharing your location if you actually want people to find you:

Cool, onto the fakery.

You have two options. You can manually select a location on Google Maps and you can use a GPS spoofing app to do it for you. The first method is simple but in the current version of WhatsApp, it is easy to see it is faked.

You can check out the manual method here if you want to risk it, but we’re in it for the legit forgery.

There are a number of GPS spoofing apps on the Google Play Store. Some are free, while others will cost you a bit.

Find a good app that has good reviews and doesn’t cost much and install it.

For these apps to work, you will need Developer Options enabled on your phone. The GPS will need permissions to mess with the GPS on your phone and that isn’t covered by standard permissions.

Here’s how it all comes together:

1. Open your phone and navigate to Settings.
2. Select About Phone and tap your Build Number seven times to enable. You should see a message that says ‘You are now a developer!’ if it worked.
3. Download and install a fake GPS app.
4. Allow it to access location and provide it the permissions it needs.
5. Enable the app to provide a bogus GPS location. Follow the steps at the top to use live location in WhatsApp.

Once done, you should be able to set your location to anywhere in the world using the app’s map.

Teenage me would have found this very useful for those evenings when I was “sleeping at a friend’s house” while actually out drinking in Obs (sorry mom).

Adult me might just set my location to Prague in the future, to get out of weekend plans.

[source:techjunkie]