If you try to ping someone’s location and their phone is dead, there’s not much an app can do. Most location-sharing apps will just sit there and spin while they wait for some sort of response, leaving you to worry about all the reasons their phone might not be responding with a current location. Did they lose signal? Did someone steal their phone? Now when you let a friend know where you are through the Google Maps app, another icon is included with your location information and battery level details.
“You’ll be able to keep a watchful eye on how much battery life they have left. Now, there won’t be as much cause for worry if someone’s location drops off because you’ll be able to know if it could just be because their phone died,” the report added.
Early in 2017, Google added a feature to Google Maps that lets you opt to share your location real time with your close friends and family. And now this latest feature was spotted in a Google Maps APK teardown back in February, so we knew it was on the way. A few people have mentioned seeing it pop up on their devices since (including variations that only showed when the battery was low), but today it seems to have gone live for a much larger audience.
To use location sharing, tap the options menu in the app and select ‘Share location’. You can then pick one or more people from your list of contacts. You can also share your location using a messaging or social media app. The recipient will receive a link that they can open in Google Maps or a web browser.
The feature is currently rolling out globally to Google Maps for both Android and iOS.
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