I love when I have a chance to learn something new as a tester - a new skill to add to my bag of tricks to be used to break something in a fun new way or to help test something that someone thought couldn't be done. That happened to me when I had to figure out how to pretend to be in various countries around the world as a tester. Sure, I could confirm that I'm in America, and use some dev debug options to force the app to think it was in other places...but that doesn't fully test the code or the app. And what fun is that?

PDX Files

Xcode uses the GPS Exchange Format (GPX) to reference geolocation points to use in simulation. Essentially these are just files with specific latitude and longitude formats.

The formatting is fairly basic. Here's an example of a GPX file for simulating China: