WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging service, is giving its over 1 billion users another reason to keep coming back to the app multiple times a day: live location sharing. WhatsApp, of course, already gives you the option to share your current location with other users, but that’s a static, one-time share. They key difference with live location sharing is that it is dynamic and updates your location in real time, even when WhatsApp is in the background.
“Live location is a way to share your location in a chat and the participants in that chat will then be able to see your real-time location as it updates on a map. [It’s] short-term in nature, it’s limited in duration,” Zafir Khan, Product Manager at WhatsApp told Gadgets 360 while giving a demo of the feature earlier this week.
Your location is shared at the chat level, which means you can share your live location in a one-on-one WhatsApp conversation or a group chat.
How does it work?
When you try to share your live location in a WhatsApp chat – by tapping the Attach icon on Android, or the Plus icon on the iPhone – you will be prompted to select the duration of time for which the share will be active. You can only choose from one of the preset options – 15 minutes, 1 hour (default), and 8 hours – and, optionally, add a comment. Khan said that these durations had been picked based on the common scenarios in which people are most likely to use WhatsApp live location sharing. Users can still choose to share a one-time, static location if they prefer.
You can manually stop sharing live location data within a chat at any given time. A new option in your Account Privacy settings will give you an overview of all WhatsApp chats you are sharing your live location in at the time.
Live location shares will show up in WhatsApp chats as thumbnails that show the initial location of the user and a ‘Live until’ time. Tapping ‘View live location’ will take you to a map view where you can see the current location of all the users who are presently sharing their location in that chat. You can switch to a Satellite/ Terrain view of the map if you desire, and even see live traffic data as an overlay, which sounds pretty convenient if you are waiting for someone.
Below the map you will see the names of the same users in a list view, with a timestamp that indicates the freshness of their location data. You can tap a name on the list or tap a profile picture on the map to zoom in to the location of a particular user where you will also see the margin of error (for example “Accurate to 50 metres”) for their location. You can tap the little (i) button next to the user to bring a pop-up that lets you communicate with them using WhatsApp in different ways.
