Yes. But first, one thing it took me a few weeks of trying things to work out: location sharing is actually two quite different problems that look like one.
The first is finding one person who is standing still. A friend at a festival, a kid in a shopping centre, a parked car. Apple does this brilliantly with Find My, arrow and metres, provided you both have a recent iPhone.
The second is knowing where a whole group is while it's moving. Six people on bikes or motorcycles, all in motion, kilometres apart, changing by the minute. Here the question isn't "where's Tom" but "how far behind me is he, and is he closing or dropping". And the first kind of tool isn't built for that.
| Install | Account | Distance as a number | Who sees positions | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WhatsApp live location | yes | phone number | no, just a pin | nobody, it's encrypted |
| Google Maps | sender yes | Google account | no | |
| Apple Find My | iPhone only | Apple ID | yes, but close range and iPhone 15/16 only | nobody, it's encrypted |
| Life360 | yes | yes | the exact figure was removed | the company; it sells audience segments built on it |
| Garmin GroupTrack | hardware for everyone | yes | yes | Garmin |
Garmin GroupTrack is genuinely what I wanted. But a head unit at a few hundred quid for every single person in the group was never going to happen. And with WhatsApp I simply couldn't work out from the map, while riding, whether that pin was one bend back or one village.
It's a web page. Not an app from a store but what's called a progressive web app, it runs entirely in the browser. That's why it works identically on iPhone and Android and nobody installs anything. For our group that was the whole point: half on iPhones, half on Android, and every solution we tried fell over on one half or the other.
One person creates a group, sends the link, the others tap it and type a name. Then everyone sees, for everyone else, the distance in metres and an arrow. If you want you can add it to your home screen as an icon, but you don't have to.
Free, no account. You can try it right now, on your own: create a group and see what it looks like.
When you create a group, a random key is generated on your phone. It's placed in the link after the # sign. And that's the trick: the part of an address after the hash is something a browser, by standard, never sends to a server. It stays on the device. So only the phones that opened the link have the key. The server receives encrypted data it holds no key for, and passes it along. No history, no IP logging, the group expires by itself after the trip.
Which means one thing: the link is the key. Whoever you send it to can see the group. Don't post it in a chat with two hundred people in it.
Because it runs in a browser, the screen has to stay on. It doesn't track in the background the way an installed app does. On a bike or motorcycle with the phone in a mount, that's irrelevant. For a full day's walk with the phone in a rucksack, something installed is the better tool, and I'd rather say that now.
Money-wise, nothing. I wrote it for my own group and it seemed daft to keep it to ourselves.
Specifically: a group bike ride and a motorcycle convoy.