Finally, we now have Live Location Sharing on Whatsapp! On their Official blog, WhatsApp announced that you’ll be able to share your location in real-time with friends on your contact list.
As you all know, the Live Location has been available for its founder, Facebook for a while now! One great news there is that, You can share your location with an individual or in a group chat!
Your location is shared at the chat level, which means you can share your live location in a one-on-one WhatsApp conversation or a group chat. But does it drain the battery as others?
Whatsapp Khan’s response to battery usage when using the Live Location;
“Our engineering team spent a significant amount of time optimizing battery and performance for this feature,” he explained. “We have special techniques to help conserve your battery when sharing live location. So it takes into account several different factors, such as how long you’ve been sharing your live location, whether someone on the other end who you are sharing with is looking at the map, your current battery level.”
“We take into account these factors and several others to determine how often to get a location update from your phone because by being intelligent about that we can help conserver some battery,” he added. “We are just launching this feature so this will be something that we also continuously optimize over time as we get more usage of the feature.”
Whatsapp Live Location is available on both Android and iPhone and will be rolling out in the app in the coming weeks.
How to Use
Simple to use, firstly, you open a chat with a person or group. Under “Location” in the attach button, tap “Share Live Location.” You can set a timer for how long you want to share your location, and everyone you’ve chosen to send your location to can see where you are on a map in real-time.
Then, the feature also works if multiple people share locations simultaneously, as people’s icons will then appear on the same map.
How Does it Work
Meanwhile, it is time-based, you decide if to use it for a few hours, minutes, or seconds, another good thing here is, you can decide to switch it OFF at any given time.
When you try to share your live location in a WhatsApp chat – by tapping the Attach icon on Android, or the Plus icon on the iPhone – you will be prompted to select the duration of time for which the share will be active.
You can only choose from one of the preset options – 15 minutes, 1 hour (default), and 8 hours – and, optionally, add a comment. Khan said that these durations had been picked based on the common scenarios in which people are most likely to use WhatsApp live location sharing. Users can still choose to share a one-time, static location if they prefer.
Below the map, you will see the names of the same users in a list view, with a timestamp that indicates the freshness of their location data. You can tap a name on the list or tap a profile picture on the map to zoom in to the location of a particular user where you will also see the margin of error (for example “Accurate to 50 meters”) for their location. You can tap the little (i) button next to the use
You can manually stop sharing live location data within a chat at any given time. A new option in your Account Privacy settings will give you an overview of all WhatsApp chats you are sharing your live location in at the time.
WhatsApp promises that, like all of its other messaging functions, location sharing will be end-to-end encrypted. The timer also appears to serve a security function. Users can choose to stop sharing their locations whenever or let the Live Location timer expire.
