Ever wanted to use Find My Friends with your Android friends? Or Trusted Contacts with iPhone owners who still refuse to switch to your favorite mobile operating system? Well, Google fixed that with a Trusted Contacts update that will now let you share your location across platforms. Think of it like Apple’s Find My Friends app, but across platforms!
One of the many useful tricks the iPhone has is a little app called Find My Friends. The app will let you locate your friends and family on a map, and can be a life-saving feature (or an incredibly invasive way to spy).
Over on Android, there’s Google’s Trusted Contacts app, which pretty much does the same thing. But unlike Apple’s version, this one isn’t platform-specific anymore. Trusted Contacts is now available in the App Store, Google announced in a blog post, which means it doesn’t matter what devices your family uses. If you need to ask for someone’s location or share your own, everyone will get the information.
The app lets you customize the default time after which your location is shared with someone following a request, and you can even add trusted contacts by phone number. Trusted Contacts is just one of the many apps that make location sharing easy. For example, you can do the same thing in various chat apps available on both platforms. But unlike Facebook, WhatsApp, or iMessage, Trusted Contacts — and Find My Friends, for that matter — only deal with location and nothing else.
Google’s app has the advantage of working on both iPhone and Android. Then again, you have to agree to share your location data with Google for tracking to function. Remember, nothing is truly free on the internet.
