Comment by Jedd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jedd | Hacker News Reader

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What I really want is a low-impact, low-risk way of knowing where someone who is happy that I can do this actually is. My typical use case is working out if my wife is driving home, or at the gym etc -- where SMS/IM won't get a response, and a phone call would be intrusive. I don't want constant sends from the remote device, rather than ability to trigger a pull of current geo.

That is - low values of intrusion, negligible battery usage, relatively low exploit surface.

Glympse[1]is handy for ad hoc notifications - I use it sometimes to give family an idea of my time of arrival. But it also requires me to activate it, and runs for (IIRC) at most two hours. And by golly it sucks up battery.

Cerberus[2] could do this, but it's not the primary use case, and the diddling around that's required is messy - plus, massively intrusive given the feature set (remote wipe, camera & audio recording, etc).

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.glympse.an...

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lsdroid.ce...

It's a damn shame Google hasn't solved this yet, because with my iPhone, it's as easy as "share location with contact", and I'm presented with "24 hours" or "indefinitely". And it just works. There are even geobounding alerts available.

Google released Trusted Contacts [0] a while ago that essentially works like how the OP wants. You can one-time request a contact's location and (unless they block it) it will share it after a timeout. It also allows temporary sharing and has last-known location for if your battery dies.

[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

Thanks for the recommendation.

First time I'd read the description it looked like the recipient of the request had the option to grant / deny - which kind of defeated the purpose. Re-reading it looks like there must be some kind of time-out feature, where it will default to a response? Anyway - will give it a go.

Yes, that's exactly how it works. It asks first, but if there's no response in a while (and you're on their list of trusted contacts), then it defaults to allow.

Okay -- we played with this tonight -- and it's not fit for purpose.

There's a 5-minute delay, with a screen-on alert for the duration at the b-end, before you can get a geo-location response back.

If the 5-minute delay was configurable (I want it immediately), and the pop-up was a notification (sys-tray rather than full screen / break -screen saver) then it'd be a contender.

As it is, it's less useful than sending an SMS.

Whats your use case for needing to know someones location and you must know within 5 minutes? or is the objection more about the full screen popup(i.e. if they are at the gym, does the request interrupt their music listening?)

Use case is essentially that there are times when I'll make a quick decision based upon where my wife is. I could be more organised and use Trusted Contacts 5 minutes before I want to know the answer, but I'm typically not.

Thinking commute -- train then long walk home -- if convenient I'd rather share a lift than walk. Not the best example as I really should walk, but nonetheless.

With the gym scenario -- I know the days of week, and rough time, she'll be there, so not the best. In that case it's not the full screen pop-up that's the problem, just the hard-coded 5 minute delay.

Better example: early evenings, I'd like to know if she's working late or driving home. Without requiring that I interrupt her. If I SMS and she's driving, she has to break the law to respond. If I call (or SMS) and she's still working, that's disruptive. If I use Trusted Contacts and she's still working, also disruptive.

I'd never really thought about this stuff before the Google Maps article, and some of the discussion here -- it feels like my use case isn't that uncommon a thing. I may look at some of those family / kid-tracker applications, though last time I reviewed the field there they felt a bit clunky and overly intrusive.

How is that better than the new Google feature?

It's existed for years and will continue to exist.

And it's still within the walled garden of Apple. Same issue with Googles solution.

If you're looking for a Glympse alternative, I made Graticule[1].

Differences:

* you can configure what location technology to use (gps/network/passive)

* no time limit

* you can tweak how often it should update

* privacy conscious

Tweaking the location technology/update interval gives you the freedom to balance accuracy/battery life.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emilburzo....

Thanks Emil. This looks really good, I've installed it already, but will install on my wife's phone tomorrow to get a feel for the inter-play features.

It sounds like you can adjust the update period only -- which I accept uses modest data & battery -- but no feature to (only) provide location in response to a request-for-location from the far-end?

> It sounds like you can adjust the update period only

and the location technology to use:

    - GPS: best accuracy, bad battery life          -- best used outside cities    
    - Network: decent accuracy, decent battery life -- best used inside cities or areas with lots of WiFi AP's
    - Passive: variable accuracy, best battery life -- best used when you have another location app already doing location requests (like Waze, Google Maps, etc)

> but no feature to (only) provide location in response to a request-for-location from the far-end?

That's correct, it doesn't cover your preferred "click to request updates" use case as I'm not a fan of things happening to my phone by outside requests :)

I'm curious - what about the persistent sharing option here doesn't fit your needs? (For instance, is it that you're concerned about battery usage? Do you want a more active notification to the other person at the time of a triggered pull? Et cetera.)

As Ingress players, we're painfully aware of the cost of GPS to battery life.

But, yeah, this feature looks to be a 'I want to share with person x', rather than 'Person x can request my location without me needing to grant / deny each request' feature. Even reading the original google blog post about it - it sounds like it's not a passive operation. ( https://blog.google/products/maps/share-your-trips-and-real-... )

As chrisfosterelli noted, Trusted Contacts may provide the functionality I'm looking for.

Trusted Contacts, Location Sharing, Location History, etc are all powered by the background location service which is significantly more conservative about battery life than something like Ingress :) But yes, if you're looking for a triggered request then Trusted Contacts may work.

As per my other comment -- after some experimentation, Trusted Contacts is a bit rubbish. It insists on asking user permission at the b-end each time, with a display-on request, and waiting a full 5 minutes (non-configurable) for a response.

Do we know that this new Google feature differs from what you want?

Yes, we do. As per my post of the original google blogpost (rather than the techcrunch write-up of same) it's very much a (far-end) user-activated feature. I'm looking for a local-user activated feature of a remote-device.

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