Setting up a VPN connection on an iOS device is really easy and allows users private and secure access to their company or private networks, also letting them access region-restricted content and faking their location to some extent. Having said that, any app that demands access to your current location for navigational and other similar purposes makes use of the device’s GPS unit to pinpoint your coordinates. While VPN can make some apps believe that you are in a far-off location, the hardware unit remains unaffected from it. If you have a jailbroken device though, it is now pretty easy to not only fake your location, but actually provide the exact coordinates of the place you want your iPhone to register as your current location. Cool, isn’t it? The tweak is called akLocationX, and the best thing about it is that the location you enter in it remains functional till you put a new one in or disable the tweak completely, which means that users don’t have to worry about spoofing their location every single time they want to fool an app.

akLocationX adds a menu of its own to the stock Settings app. Other than links to support and the developer’s Twitter and Weibo pages, the menu has just three options. You can enable or disable the tweak using the toggle provided at the top of the screen. The two fields below the toggle are there to let you enter the longitude and latitude of any location you want. It might have been easier had akLocationX allowed users to search for places from within its menu, but for now you have to find the coordinates of a location yourself (through Google or otherwise), and then manually enter them in the akLocationX menu. It is, however, possible to paste the values into the Latitude and Longitude fields, which is good because at times the tweak’s keyboard lacks an entry for a decimal symbol.

Once you have entered fake coordinates in the akLocationX menu, they kick into action whenever any app tries to access your location. This can be great for privacy buffs after the recent PRISM fiasco, but can also let you access region-restricted content in some apps. To make things return to normal, just turn off the tweak or uninstall it completely.

Despite having a tongue-twisting name, akLocationX is a really useful tweak. It doesn’t charge its users anything, and can be downloaded for free from the BigBoss repo of the Cydia store. There might be other tweaks that perform a similar task, but most of them don’t work with iOS 6 while akLocationX does perfectly.

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