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Are you using the actual native app or just the mobile website? If you have wifi off, it should still have access to your GPS to get your location, unless that is either off or blocked/unavailable.

If the website then how would it know your location if you don't allow it?

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There are several better failbacks than "most popular store in the US." Starting with "Store closest to the centroid of past N addresses that I have clicked."

Its actually worse. Only this Saturday I searched for a ice cream shop and it directed me 2.5 miles away. So now I am riding the prescribed route when I see a different branch of the same shop in 0.6 miles. Baffled I looked again at the search results and for some reason this nearest branch was listed at number 5 and I had to scroll down to find it. This when I had GPS and 3G on.

Google has very good geo-IP location detection, almost creepily good in some cases. Scroll down to the bottom of the search results on a desktop browser sometime and see for yourself.

On desktop perhaps but not mobile carrier internet. Those can sometimes show you as a few states away.

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