Item — HN Reader

First paragraph of the corresponding email announcement:

> Over three years ago, we launched the Trusted Contacts app as a way to help people stay up to date with their loved ones’ whereabouts. Since then, we’ve built this functionality directly into Google Maps with Location Sharing - making it even easier to share your live location with trusted friends and family.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but location sharing doesn't seem to provide the same functionality. It's an always on feature for sharing your location with others, not a "request someone's location" feature and if that person doesn't respond in 15min, enable location sharing for some time.

The obvious question is: what's a good/trustworthy alternative?

1 comments

> what's a good/trustworthy alternative?

I don't intend this to be snarky, since probably people won't switch over this, but iOS has the awkwardly named "Find my" app, a combination of the previous "Find my friends" app (which does what you want), and the "Find my phone" app. (Which is for finding your own phone if you lose it.)

I played around with "Find My" last night... similar to Location Sharing, it seems to allow me to look at the location of all devices connected with my account as long as they are online. But that's not necessarily what I want. Before I can access someone else's location, I want to inform them that I'd like to know where they are and give them a couple of minutes to respond. That's the key missing feature here...or am I the one missing something?

Yeah, you can do that. When you request someones location, you can specify a time limit. When that runs out, you have to request it again.

"Forever" is an option.