How accurate is the GPS location on a virtual inspection?

Typically 5–20 metres outdoors on a modern phone. Accuracy is recorded with every capture, geofences are set in metres, and spoofed or low-confidence locations are flagged rather than silently accepted.

Can we require GPS on some steps and not others?

Yes, location requirements are set per template step.

Is the location stored with the photo file itself?

It is stored in the verified record alongside the file, which is more reliable than EXIF because EXIF can be rewritten.

Do you store the customer's location after the inspection?

Only the capture coordinates attached to the inspection record, subject to your retention policy.

How Accurate Is GPS on a Virtual Inspection?

Key takeaways

Expect 5–20 metres outdoors, wider indoors — and the accuracy is recorded.
Geofence breaches are flagged for review, not silently discarded.
Spoofing is detected through attestation and movement plausibility.
Missing location is labelled, never quietly assumed.

What accuracy you can expect

Outdoors with a clear sky view, modern phones report 5–20 metres of horizontal accuracy. Indoors, in dense urban cores, or in basements, that can widen to 50 metres or more as the device falls back to Wi-Fi and cell triangulation.

Rather than pretending this variance does not exist, every capture stores its reported accuracy radius alongside the coordinates, so a reviewer can see exactly how confident the reading was.

How geofencing uses it

You set a radius per template or per inspection — 100 metres suits most suburban property work, while a large commercial site may need 500.

A capture outside the fence is not silently dropped: it is flagged for review with the measured distance, so a legitimate edge case (a photo taken from across a wide street) can be accepted deliberately.

Detecting spoofed locations

Mock-location apps and emulators are the common spoofing route. Device attestation and sensor consistency checks flag captures where the reported position contradicts other signals.

Impossible movement — two captures kilometres apart seconds apart — is flagged automatically.

When GPS is unavailable

If the customer declines location permission or the device cannot get a fix, the capture is marked as location-unverified rather than being blocked, and your policy decides whether that is acceptable.

Many teams allow it for interior photos and require it for exterior and address-proving frames.

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