If you’ve never used live location sharing before, it’s actually pretty convenient. You can share this information and let it run in the background, so someone can keep track of your whereabouts. It’s a versatile feature that can be used for many reasons.
Turn the live location feature on when you want to share your location with someone so you can meet up, or use it as a tool so that someone can keep tabs on your whereabouts, just in case you’re in an area that makes you feel unsafe.
Although this is a feature is currently found in Android’s Find Hub, it apparently could make its way into Google Messages in the near future. 9to5Google was able to dig into the code of the latest beta version of Messages to discover that Google is working on integrating the live location tracking feature into the app.
An obvious but welcome move
It’s important to integrate useful features as much as you can in order to keep things concise. And in this case, it makes complete sense. If you’re messaging a friend, colleague, or family member, what better way to show them your location than by showing them where you are on a map in real time?
For the most part, it looks like this version integrated into Messages could work pretty much the same way as what is found in Android’s Find Hub. The Find Hub feature allows you to share your location, with your avatar appearing on a map. People can also share their location with you at the same time, making it easy to pinpoint where people are at that exact moment.
And unlike a static location, this one will constantly update so you can see where people are over a period of time. As you can imagine, this will make meeting up extremely simple in a busy city or location. You can keep the feature on indefinitely, or you can set durations that will automatically turn the feature off once the time expires.
Of course, you can always just stop sharing your location at any time, which should provide some peace of mind. Again, this is a feature available in Find Hub right now, but this new finding shows that Google could make it part of Messages sometime in the future. Strong competitors like WhatsApp have this feature available, so it was only a matter of time before Google brought it to Messages.