WhatsApp to allow Sharing your Location in real time with ‘Live Location’ feature

WhatsApp Messenger with over a 200 million monthly active users in India, has reinvented time and again what an instant messaging platform can do. Adding to the list of its features is now a new one dubbed- Live Location Share. The feature allows you to share your location in real-time with family or friends. It is a simple and secure way to let people know where you are.

The said feature is end-to-end encrypted and lets you control who you share your location with and for how long. One can choose to stop sharing at any time or let the Live Location timers simply expire. The company quoted that the new feature will be available on both the Operating Systems- iOS, Android and would be rolling out on the app in the coming weeks.

To access the feature, Open a WhatsApp chat on Android /iOS, with the person or group you want to share location with. Under ‘Location’ in the attach button, there will be a new option to ‘Share Live Location.’ Choose for how long you want to share and tap send. Make sure your phone’s GPS is enabled. The minimum time for which one can share location with a selected contact is 15 min. The other two options of 1 hour and 8 hours are also available. Each person in the group chat would be able to see one’s real-time location on a map and if more than one person shares their Live Location in the group, all locations would be visible on the same map.

While this new feature can prove to be useful in various ways for simple access- whether you're meeting up with friends, letting loved ones know you're safe, or sharing your commute; it shouldn’t turn into yet another snooping app all in the name of safety. The 'Live Location' feature comes as a second major update by the company after it launched its WhatsApp Business application earlier this month.

Source: WhatsAppBlog

I think it's Google Maps that first launched this feature. I've been using this feature and it's really nice. The only complain I have is that it's really hard for the non-tech folks to find out this feature hidden in the app menu.

I hope WhatsApp makes it easier for people to locate this feature and actually use it.

I agree with @Kaustubh Katdare I hope people start using this location sharing service to mention an event’s location. Countless number of times I have asked people who are organising an event to send their destination through WhatsApp so that people can use it on Google Maps to reach the destination but sadly they rely on the lowest form of technology available to them which is voice call. With live location sharing it will be useful not only for the event organiser but the other people in the group to map out location.

These Tech Giants are are killing other apps.
There is very good app called Glimpse which is very good and allow to share location for free for 1 hour. Now, this feature copied by first Google and now Facebook copied this feature.
I hate Google for these things. Few years back they acquired Nik Collections, one of the best editor with presets. Now they killed it.
After failing Google Wave, and Google Glass (which were futuristic products) looks like they are after, what's being popular, copy or acquire them for profit and kill it, when it fall behind.

Yeah, Google killed the Sparrow Mail app too. I absolutely loved that app. 😔