Is it legal to change the location on my own phone?

Changing the coordinates on your own phone is not prohibited by law in itself. It is a built-in capability of the operating system, provided by the manufacturer for development and testing, and you turn it on on your own device and for your own device.

The question is almost never about the law but about the terms of the specific services you use. Many services explicitly forbid misleading them about your location, and the consequence is usually not legal liability but an account ban — sometimes without warning and without a way to restore it.

Hence a practical distinction. Testing location logic in your own app, checking how someone else's app behaves in another city, privacy in apps you do not want to tell your exact address, exploring maps of another region — these are scenarios where spoofing deceives no one.

Confirming a delivery that did not happen, checking in at a workplace, collecting location-based rewards and bypassing regional restrictions on paid content are scenarios where a mock coordinate serves as proof of something that did not happen. Here the user bears the risk, and we do not support such scenarios: they would require promising what the app does not do.

Keep in mind that many such services read the “mock source” flag and simply refuse to work with substituted coordinates — so the question is often settled technically before it becomes a question of terms. More about this — why an app sees real coordinates.

If in doubt about a specific case, read the terms of the service for which you are changing your location. That is more reliable than any general answer.