What is wloc?

OpenHRTT WLoc is an open source iOS and macOS tool written in Swift that lets a user change the location their device reports to Apple's location services. A person picks or searches for a spot on a map inside the app, and that choice gets passed through a Packet Tunnel network extension paired with a local HTTPS proxy running on the device itself. The proxy only intercepts traffic aimed at Apple's own location domains, gs-loc.apple.com and gs-loc-cn.apple.com, and swaps in the coordinates the user picked. The README is explicit that this proxy is not meant to work as a general purpose VPN or a broad HTTPS traffic capture tool, since it only touches those two specific addresses. Setting it up requires a real Mac with Xcode 16 or newer, CocoaPods, and OpenSSL 3, plus an Apple Developer account that has Network Extensions enabled, since that capability is not available on free accounts. After cloning the project and running pod install, developers open the workspace file rather than the project file. No reusable certificates ship in the repository. Instead, a bundled script generates a fresh local certificate on each developer's own machine, and those generated files are excluded from version control. Getting the app fully working also means adjusting bundle identifiers across four build targets (an iOS app, an iOS tunnel extension, a macOS app, and a macOS tunnel extension) and pointing them at a shared App Group. Full verification, including certificate trust and the tunnel connection itself, needs an actual device rather than a simulator. The project also defines a custom wlocapp:// link format so other apps or shortcuts can hand it a location as a JSON payload, supporting a few different coordinate systems. It depends on a handful of third party Swift libraries for networking, layout, and keyboard handling. The project's own code is released under the MIT License, though the bundled third party libraries carry their own separate licenses.