Real-time GPS Tracking

← All features

GPS works everywhere — even at 35 000 feet

GPS receivers are passive. Your phone listens for satellite signals; it never transmits anything. That’s why GPS works perfectly in airplane mode: the cellular and WiFi transmitters are off, but Location Services keeps doing its job.

Skyty taps directly into Apple’s CoreLocation framework, configured for the highest accuracy and the otherNavigation activity type — the same profile used by the Maps and Compass apps when you’re moving fast.

What you see, live

• Coordinates — six decimal places of latitude and longitude (≈ 11 cm precision when fix is good).
• Altitude — GPS altitude in MSL (mean sea level) or WGS84 ellipsoidal, switchable from settings.
• Speed — instantaneous ground speed in km/h, mph or knots.
• Course — your true heading in degrees, with cardinal direction.
• Accuracy — horizontal and vertical accuracy reported by the receiver, so you know how reliable each reading is.

Offline reverse-geocoding

Coordinates by themselves are abstract — 48.85, 2.35 doesn’t mean much when you’re half asleep. Skyty bundles a curated database of cities, airports and oceans. The app finds the nearest one in milliseconds with a population-weighted bounding-box algorithm — no Nominatim, no Apple geocoder, no network round-trip.

So you don’t see “48.85, 2.35.” You see Paris, France.

Always on, always fast

GPS updates flow into the UI at the same rate the receiver delivers them — typically 1 Hz. There’s no debounce, no spinner, no cold start. The numbers move the moment your plane does.