Getting GPS coordinates on your phone

Everyone once in a while people ask about how to get GPS coordinates using their phone. Getting your current location is fairly straightforward, but what if you want to get the latitude and longitude for some other point? Maybe you want to meet someone in a park and give them the exact coordinates of where the picnic will be sometime in the future. Unfortunately there is no simple way to just click on a point and see the coordinates in Google Maps Mobile. The good news is that it still is possible, it just takes a few steps.

Method #1: Starred location

If you want to get the coordinates of some other point using Maps, you can save the location and find the coordinates in your saved places:

1. hold your finger on the location until a pin is dropped
2. click on the "Dropped pin" banner on the bottom of the screen to pull up the options
3. click on Save to save the location to your saved places
4. hit the back arrow to get out of the dropped location
5. click on the menu icon in the upper left and select "Your Places"
6. The location you saved will be there with the coordinates (in decimal degrees format)

The problem with this method is that you can't copy the coordinates, if you try pressing on them you won't be able to highlight the text. If you need to coordinates as text, once you save the location will also be able to get the coordinates from your bookmarks page at https://www.google.com/bookmarks. You can also use that page to delete the location when you are done with it, or you can just un-star it from Maps Mobile.

Method #2: Shared location

There is another slightly different way that involves grabbing the location from a URL:

1. hold your finger on the location until a pin is dropped
2. click on the "Dropped pin" banner on the bottom of the screen to pull up the options
3. select the pin and choose the Share icon
4. select Gmail and it will start an email that includes a short link that look something like https://goo.gl/maps/?????
5. select the link and copy it
6. open up a browser and paste the link and follow it, and the Lat/Long will be in the address bar