Yes, it is possible. Your application can ask to be notified of significant location changes or to simply continue using the GPS while executing in the background. The former—the approach recommended by Apple—uses less power at the cost of accuracy (this blog post indicates that the updates are accurate to roughly 500m), while the latter is as accurate as the device can manage. This is all detailed in the iOS Application Programming Guide and and the Location Awareness Programming Guide.

If you simply want your application to be notified when the device moves into a particular region, you may want to look into CLLocationManager 's startMonitoringForRegion:desiredAccuracy: . If the device moves into a particular geographical region, your app is launched (even if it's not running!).