How do I simulate walking or driving a route?
A single fixed position is not what you want. You want the reported position to move — along streets, at a speed that reads as a person on foot or a car on a road.
Pick a start and an end. GPSLarp fetches a real street route between them and moves the reported position along that geometry. Walk goes at a fixed 1.4 metres per second, about 5 km/h. Drive spreads the route's own estimated duration across it, so the pace varies with the road. Neither is adjustable, and the Mac drives the whole journey.
The limit to plan around before anything else
The Mac has to stay running and connected for the entire journey. The movement is not handed to the phone to play by itself — GPSLarp holds the connection and pushes each position as the journey reaches it. Quitting the app, letting the Mac sleep, closing the lid, or losing the connection ends the journey wherever it had got to. A two-hour drive means two hours of an awake, connected Mac.
01Where the route comes from
Neither mode draws a straight line between your two points. GPSLarp sends the start and the end to a routing service over the internet, and that service returns real road geometry — the shape an actual route between those points has, with its turns and its detours in place.
A walk follows a driving route
Worth knowing before it puzzles you on a map. Both modes ask the routing service for the same thing: a driving route. Walk then plays that route at a walking pace rather than asking for a separate pedestrian one. So a walk follows streets — it will not take a footpath, cut through a park or use an alley, and it obeys one-way restrictions that a person on foot would ignore. The pace is a walking pace; the shape is a car's.
You may be offered a choice of routes for the same pair of points — the fastest one plus up to two alternatives — in the way a navigation app offers a choice. You pick which one to use before anything starts moving.
From there the application builds a track: the route's points, each with a timestamp saying when the position should be there. Playing that track is the journey — GPSLarp works through it and reports each position to the phone as its moment arrives.
02How fast each one moves
Walk moves at 1.4 metres per second. That is roughly 5 km/h, an ordinary walking pace, and it is a fixed number: the same on a flat street and up a hill, the same on a short route and a long one.
Drive uses the routing service's own estimate of how long the route takes, and spreads the movement across the geometry accordingly. So the speed is not one number — it varies with the road, faster where the service expects a fast road and slower where it does not.
Neither is adjustable. There is no speed control in the application, no slider, and no setting. This is worth stating plainly because it is one of the most common things people go looking for: it is not hidden in a preferences pane, it is not there. The only lever over how long a journey takes is which route you pick.
If you want to control the movement yourself rather than follow a route, that is what the joystick is for — you push it and the position goes where you push, at a speed you set by how far you push it.
03Setting one up
01Connect the iPhone and select it
Same starting point as everything else. If the phone is not in the device list, start at GPSLarp can't find my iPhone.
02Choose walk or drive
The two modes differ only in how the timing is worked out. Both follow real street geometry; walk imposes a constant pace on it, drive takes the pace from the route.
03Set the start and the end
Both are chosen the same way any place is chosen — click the map, search for it, or take a saved one. Setting an exact latitude and longitude covers the details, including what happens when a typed coordinate pair does not resolve.
04Pick a route if you are offered a choice
Up to two alternatives may come back for the same pair of points. They are different roads and therefore different durations, which — since you cannot change the speed — is the one thing that decides how long the journey lasts.
05Start it, and leave the Mac alone
Once it is running, the Mac is doing the work for as long as the journey lasts. Stop the journey from GPSLarp when you have finished, or see putting the real location back, which covers every way of ending it.
04What it needs and what it costs
It needs the internet, twice over. Once for the map, and once for the route itself — there is no offline routing. What still works without a connection is on using GPSLarp without an internet connection.
Planning a route tells somebody else where you are going. The two endpoints are sent to a public routing service run by a third party in order to get the geometry back. That is a real privacy consequence and it is worth naming rather than burying: the service sees the pair of points. The privacy policy lists the services the app contacts directly from your machine.
Every account gets one free walk and one free drive. They are counted separately — using the free walk leaves the free drive intact. What you get without paying has the whole arrangement.
05If it stops part-way
The journey ended early and the position stayed where it stopped. That is the mechanism above rather than a fault: the track is played from the Mac, so anything that ends the connection ends the journey. Sleep settings, a closed lid, a phone that wandered off the Wi-Fi network, a cable knocked loose — each produces exactly this.
No route came back at all. The routing service is on the internet and is not ours. A pair of points it cannot connect by road — across water, or somewhere it has no data — has no route to return.
The Mac shows the position moving and the phone does not. That is a different problem and has its own page: I picked a place and my iPhone's location didn't change.
The honest limit of this page: it describes the route the application fetches, the track it builds from it, and the positions it sends. Nobody here has measured what an iPhone does with a played track — not on any iOS version, not over a cable, not over Wi-Fi — so this page tells you what is sent and stops there.