I went looking for a switch that lets you cut Google Play Services out of your phone’s location tracking, expecting a simple toggle buried somewhere in an app permissions screen. I figured it’d be the same process as revoking camera or microphone access from any other app. Android 17, though, had a different plan, and it took me a few wrong turns through the settings menus before I found the control that actually did something measurable.

Google Play Services doesn’t get its own location toggle anymore

The permission screen just redirects you

I’ve got my Pixel running Android 17, so I opened Settings > Apps > Google Play services > Permissions and tapped Location, expecting the typical Allow, While in use, or Don’t allow options. Instead, a dialog popped up that said, “”Google Play Services is a provider of location services for this device. Location access can be modified from location settings.” Tapping Location access dropped me straight into the system-wide Location screen, not an app-specific permission page.

That’s a pretty big difference from what I remember from before. Play Services is no longer treated as a regular app for location purposes. Instead, it’s folded into the deeper location infrastructure of your device instead. I checked it out again, too: out of 31 apps with location access on my phone, Google Play Services wasn’t listed as one of them at all, even though every other app I’d granted location privs to show up individually with its own Allow, While in use, or Don’t allow setting.

Of course, not every Android phone will behave this way, and revoking every one of Play Services’ permissions at once, including location, can break stuff like WhatsApp location sharing, Maps, and account sign-ins on other devices, including ones that run older Android builds. With the current stock Android on this Pixel, anyway, there’s no single switch to flip for Play Services’ location access specifically. The only way forward was the one the dialog pointed me toward.

Improve Location Accuracy is the setting that actually does something

The control I ended up testing sits at Settings > Location > Location Services > Improve Location Accuracy. According to Google’s documentation, this is the crowdsourced positioning layer that blends Wi-Fi, cell tower, and sensor data with GPS to narrow down your location faster and more precisely, especially when you’re indoors or between tall buildings. Turn this off, and your phone goes back to regular GPS and sensors alone.

This feature doesn’t touch device-wide location or any individual app’s location permission. Maps can still ask for your precise location, but it just gets a rough GPS-only estimate instead of the boosted version that uses other nearby users’ positioning data. That makes turning it off much more narrow than revoking Play Services outright, and probably closer to what we think about when we decide we want to dial back Google’s location footprint on our devices.

What happened with Improve Location Accuracy off?

One real drop, everything else held its ground

I established a baseline with Improve Location Accuracy on for five things I use regularly, then flipped the setting off and repeated each test again. Here’s what I saw:

• Google Maps: the home location dot wobbled briefly before settling with Accuracy on; with it off, the dot settled immediately, no wobble at all. Driving navigation locked in instantly either way. I only ran this once, so I’d treat the wobble difference as anecdotal rather than proven.
• Pixel Weather: went from naming my exact neighborhood to a generic “Current Location” label. The actual temperature reading didn’t change.
• Camera and Photos: this is where the change showed. Photos geotagged with Accuracy on pinned my exact home address; with it off, the geotag dropped to city-level only.
• Find Hub: located my phone and another Android device just as precisely either way. A tablet failed to show up in both tests, on and off, which ruled out Accuracy as the cause.
• WhatsApp: dropped a location pin accurate to about 15 meters with Accuracy on, 12 meters off, which is well within normal GPS variance.

This all lines up with other tests done by other writers: turning off Improve Location Accuracy doesn’t have that much of an impact.

So is Google Play Services still tracking you?

The basic answer is yes, just less precisely. Turning off Improve Location Accuracy didn’t break my Maps, Weather app, Find Hub or even WhatsApp’s location sharing in any way I could detect. The only visible cost was photo location data losing some street-level precision.

This also doesn’t help you avoid Google’s location tracking altogether. Timeline, Location Sharing, and every app’s own location permissions still work just like they did before. Improve Location Accuracy only deals with the crowdsourced accuracy boost. If you want a full accounting of where your data actually goes, Android 17’s new persistent location indicator is a better starting point than this single toggle, since it flags every non-system app that touches your location in real time.

But since the goal is narrower, cutting one layer of background positioning without losing the apps you rely on daily, this one held up. I’m leaving Improve Location Accuracy off for now. The photo geotagging hit is a fair trade for one less always-on data feed running in the background, and I didn’t notice much of a difference in the apps I actually use every day.