I use Signal as my main messaging app now, but even for the contacts on there I have to fall back to Whatsapp to share our live locations in order to find each other. Doesn't happen very often but it is a useful feature that it is missing.
Don't iPhone and Android make it super trivial to get a live location link from the maps app that you can drop in the chat? I know Android does. Seems weird to put it directly into an encrypted messaging app when it's native to the OS.
I'm on Android and didn't know I could do that. Now I realise that you can, its just buried a little bit. Signal also lets you share photos directly from the app; I don't have to go to another app on the phone and share from there, so it does seem like a different UX route compared to what I'd expect.
Do people really need minutely updates on your bike ride? What value does it add to anyone's life to know what exact block you're on for the next 15 seconds?
Just tell them your final destination verbally, and you're done.
Maybe they were riding in a group and one of them stopped to take photos and lost the rest of them. Now they want to see where everyone else is and catch up to them.
Sometimes its about the journey, not the destination.
"I am about 200 feet southeast of the large monument in the center of the park, wearing a red shirt"
"From the XYZ Street beach entrance, we're about 100 yards north, with a blue umbrella."
Using realtime GPS tracking for this sort of thing is fetishizing technology to overoptimize a problem that was trivially solved for millenia using verbal offsets from known landmarks, while at the same time introducing and normalizing grave privacy concerns in society.
Good luck at long beaches where there are endless swaths of identical copy-paste tress, tents, deck chairs and umbrellas, without any unique elements to use as bearings. I would hate to have to send people on wild goose chases in the hot sun.
>wearing a red shirt
You've obviously never experienced how difficult it is to be found by your friends if you're short in a crowd of tall people at a concert or any sort of wide festival/gathering. Telling people what color your shirt is doesn't do anything to help if they can't see you until they're within 1m of you. And that's without it being dark at night. It's like finding Waldo IRL but more difficult.
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fetishizing technology to overoptimize a problem that was trivially solved for millenia
Ok Fred Flintstone, you do you, just let me enjoy the modern comforts of current technical achievements please and you feel free to follow the stars and buffalo tracks with your friends.
I mean people used to do this all the time. I sure did.it isn't that hard and is often more accurate than GPS, but I do get your point. For what its worth signal does have location sharing.it just doesn't update.
You can easily send a location pin. Yes I realize this isn't constantly updating, but seems enough to meet 90% (number pulled out of my ass) of the use cases.
I like the social impact of real-time disclosure of my location. I’d rather share my location for an hour with someone that I’m meeting than send them periodic messages guessing about how far away I am.
I think Apple has done a really good job with this — you can share your location for an hour, the rest of the day, or forever. I use the “share for an hour” option all the time.
I use Signal as my main messaging app now, but even for the contacts on there I have to fall back to Whatsapp to share our live locations in order to find each other. Doesn't happen very often but it is a useful feature that it is missing.