If your Samsung Galaxy S9 smartphone is experiencing GPS not working issue, first thing you must try is to improve the accuracy of the GPS system by setting it to “High Accuracy” mode. However, you might need to troubleshoot your phone further if this basic tweak can’t suffice the issue.
Troubleshooting GPS Not Working Issue on Galaxy S9
- GPS not tracking location accurately.
- GPS losing track of location intermittently.
- GPS not finding location at all.
These days a Galaxy S9 is used for GPS just as much as it’s used for calls and text messaging. Maybe even more!
It’s essential for GPS to work properly on your Galaxy S9 so you can get around, and we want to make sure we help you resolve any issues that may arise.
There could be a few reasons why your GPS isn’t working as intended and this is why we would need to troubleshoot. One of the reasons could be that the GPS antenna in your Galaxy S9 has been damaged or is defective. If hardware is the issue we can’t fix it remotely through this guide as the antenna would need replacement, however there are a few settings we can verify in your Samsung Galaxy S9 to make sure everything is running smoothly.
On your Samsung Galaxy S9 there’s a setting you have to make sure is configured properly if you’re experiencing location tracking issues. Here is what you need to do:
- Go to Settings > Connections > Location.
- Tap on Locating method.
- Select High accuracy.
Now that you’ve made sure your GPS settings for your Galaxy S9 is set to “High accuracy”, what else can you do?
Toggle the GPS off and on again. This is just a simple tweak but is proven to fix a lot of GPS issues. But turning the feature off and on again, you are phone’s wireless connectivity feature should also be refreshed. Here’s how:
- Head to Settings > Location, and toggle the feature off and on again.
Turn Airplane Mode on and off again. Another way of refreshing your phone’s wireless radios is by turning the Airplane mode on and off again. Thus, eliminating connectivity issues.
- Swipe down the notification bar.
- Then tap the Airplane Mode to turn it on.
- After at least 60 seconds, toggle it off again.
Clear the GPS Cache on Apps that are using Location Services. Most of the phone apps use location services and therefore need a GPS that is working properly for them to work as intended. Hence, some of the third-party apps tend to fail if there are stored cached files conflicting with the system. Thus, clearing these cached files might help.
- Head to Settings.
- Open App Manager.
- Find apps that use Location Tracking System like Google Map and the likes.
- Open each of them and select Clear Cache. Do the same to the rest of the apps that use Location Services.
If you’re still experiencing issues with location tracking after configuring your settings as shown above (or if you already had them configured this way prior to reading) then you can also try this: there is an application on the Google Play Store that we’ve tested that seemed to help out when our Samsung Galaxy S9 had a hard time finding GPS antennas.
- Download an application from the Google play store named “GPS Status and toolbox“. This application seemed to help tracking GPS antennas for a better location accuracy.
- If you’re still having issues after setting the accuracy to High and downloading the GPS Status app, it might be a hardware issue with your GPS antenna. In this case, consider sending your Galaxy S9 for repair through your carrier or speaking to Samsung support directly.
We hope this guide was helpful to you, cheers!
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