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I want to know if it is possible for iPhone to find the LAC and Cell Id as provided in the android os.

Like find the Location area code to find the location of the device etc.

I'm interested in this because I need to determine the approximate location of the device even with location services turned off.

Thanks in advance..

V.V
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  • Thanks danyowdee for the correction. – V.V Mar 03 '11 at 11:21
  • Upped it. Actually, I find this question much more interesting than ~50% of the iPhone-tagged stuff popping up on SO. Yes, it's definitely **not** okay to spy on users who opted out of location-services. But the technical aspect is interesting, if only to learn, what side-loaded apps can get to know about you relatively easily. – danyowdee Mar 03 '11 at 11:24

2 Answers2

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*3001#12345#* and tap Call. Enter Field Mode.Field mode reveals many of the inner settings of your iPhone, specifically up-to-date network and cell information.

Kev
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You can't find the LAC and Cell Id, but you can find the approximate location using CoreLocation. You can then use this to get an approximate area code if you have a suitable mapping of geo-locations to area codes; but it's unlikely that you'll be able to find a perfect mapping in any case, even if you knew the Cell Id.

The documentation for Core Location is here:

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/CoreLocation/Reference/CoreLocation_Framework/

AlBlue
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  • Thanks for your reply, but Is there any way to find the Cell id for iPhone as I need the same when user has put the location services off then I don want to ask the user to start it again but using Cell Id I can get the location. Please if you have any tutorial or any code kindly show it , thanks – V.V Mar 03 '11 at 09:58
  • What you're trying to do is called spying. And violates the users privacy. – Björn Kaiser Mar 03 '11 at 10:02
  • It is still not possible, no matter how many times you ask whether it is or not. – AlBlue Mar 16 '11 at 20:55
  • Isn't it possible to get LAC and CellID even if you jailbroke you iPhone? Maybe its possible to sniff it or grab this info out of the filesystem. – JohnnyFromBF Apr 06 '12 at 06:24