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A Better Version of Apple’s Find My Friends
Apple’s Find My Friends (now combined with Find My iPhone as a single app called Find My), Snapchat’s location-sharing functionality, and other similar products all have one major issue: they are focused on sharing your exact location either all the time, or at least whenever you are using the app. This presents two problems in my mind.
Aside: I appriciate the fact the Find My Friends ➡️ Find My name change happened because they're not all friends.
When you would like to share your location with a friend, you are presented with a few options:
When a user first opens the app, it will show a list of friends who are sharing their location. Rather than showing a map view, it will just be a list.
Each friend’s row in the list will contain three things, along with their name.
Currently, with Apple’s Find My Friends, you can notify, or request notifications from a friend, based on when they leave or depart a circular area with size of your choosing, centred on an address. This could be greatly improved.
First, you should be able to select a combination of notifications, rather than just notifying upon arrival, for example. You should also be able to select your friend’s live location as your destination, so you do not need to update it if they move (if they are barhopping or whatever). Most importantly, you should be able to send your ETA.
The workflow could go as follows, with each stage being optional:
When it comes to requesting the location of your friends, you should be able to request their current location, request that they share their live location, and request notifications when they arrive at your location (or another specified one). You could also request their ETA.
If Find My Friends or another more cross-platform system was available with those features, I think it would be more used. You could safely share your approximate location with all your friends, be notified when people who are coming to visit from afar will arrive, and eliminate the need for extra texts and phone calls when it can all be automated. Those are all features which we do not get now and would actually benefit from. Currently, all I get is the ability to stalk my mom and see if she is buying gas or groceries at the moment, which is about as useful as a box of kitty litter in the garden.
I am: Levi, a dude named ben living north of most Canadians
This is: my digital garden where everything is a working draft
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