You’ve long been able to find your iOS devices, because of Find My iPhone, however alongside the introduction of iOS 5, Apple announced a brand new location-based app: Find My Friends. currently rather than simply finding your device, you'll notice your friends’ devices—and presumably their users—as well.
The idea behind Find My Friends isn’t specifically new. Services like Loopt and Google Latitude are letting folks share their locations for years. (Heck, I even came up with a thought like this over a decade ago, in college, once I needed to search out my friends throughout free periods; sadly, most people weren’t carrying personal, network-connected GPS devices those days.)
For the foremost half, Find My Friends works like all different social network: You send requests to your friends, asking them to share their locations with you, and vice versa. Of course, you'll settle for or deny requests as you see match, and therefore the relationships aren't essentially mutual—that is, simply because a lover permits you to envision her location doesn’t mean that she will see yours; she’ll got to send you a separate request.
Once you have got some friends to search out, you'll read all of their locations on a map, or flick through them individually. and since Find My Friends takes advantage of 1 of the multitasking options introduced in iOS four, your friends don’t got to be actively running the app for his or her locations to be updated.
In addition to viewing friends’ locations, you'll access their contact data, send them an iMessage, initiate a FaceTime decision, or get directions to their current location. When you’re scrolling through your list of friends, a mile-marker icon next to every shows how far-off they're, though if they’re over ninety nine miles away, the app won’t offer you any further precision.
Speaking of precision, whereas Find My Friends is pretty smart at nailing down the final vicinity of your contacts, it’s not continually nearly as good at locating them on a map because it is at finding your own location. as an example, on one occasion, it claimed that a lover and I—who were seated next to every different at a concert—were 1 / 4 mile apart. however it always appears to be pretty correct, although the purple dot representing your friends is commonly surrounded by an aura of uncertainty. (This suggests that it’s relying a lot of on the less power-hungry Wi-Fi and cell tower location ways, instead of forcing a relentless GPS lookup.)
Given that imprecision, Find My Friends makes an attempt to correct for—and simplify—that issue by labeling locations, like Home, Work, School, and any custom labels you produce. Labels represent a form of bubble, therefore although Find My Friends thinks I’m one house faraway from my actual home, or across the road, it still reports my location as “Home.” When others read a location you’ve labeled, they’ll see that designation. (You can even assign your own labels to your friends’ locations, which is able to supersede any labels that they’ve outlined.)
Some locations are labeled by nearby points of interest—for example, I noticed that many of my Macworld colleagues were apparently hanging out on the Bay Bridge, that is adjacent to our San Francisco workplace.
There’s still an explicit quantity of reticence around location-sharing social networking, attributable to privacy considerations. Apple’s taken that into thought, and provided a range of how to handle it. First, and most clearly, notice My Friends is an opt-in service; you wish to download it from the App Store. It additionally uses iOS’s location services, therefore you'll disable it below Settings -Location Services. Plus, not solely are you able to disable it on your child’s iOS device below Settings - General -> Restrictions - Location services, however you'll be able to} additionally management whether or not or not your children can build changes to the present setup—say, as an example, that you just wish the flexibility to trace them, however not for them to disable the feature, or add or take away further contacts.
Within the app itself, there’s a outstanding Hide from Followers slider below the Me tab—flip it and you go incognito till you reactivate it. and each time you launch the app, it prompts you to enter your password, unless your device incorporates a passcode enabled, to stop prying eyes.