WhatsApp now has come with another reason for its customers to stay intrigued into the IM service: The Live Location Sharing.
WhatsApp already gives you the option to share your current location, but that’s just a one-time share and with specific inboxes. So the key differences with live location sharing are that it is dynamic and updates your location in real time, even when WhatsApp runs in the background.
Live location is a way to share your location in a chat and the participants in that chat will then be able to see your real-time location as it updates on a map. It is short-term in nature, it’s limited in duration.
-said Zafir Khan, Product Manager, WhatsApp.
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.
You invoke this option by tapping the Attach icon on Android, or the Plus icon on your iPhone. Th3n the app will prompt you to select the duration of time for which the share will be active.
You can not customize the timings and only get to choose from one of the preset options – 15 minutes, 1 hour (default), and 8 hours – and, optionally, add a comment if you require.
Khan said –
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.
And in case you want to stop sharing, you can manually stop the sharing live location data within a chat at any given time.
A new option in the Account Privacy settings is also added in the next update which would give you an overview of all WhatsApp chats you are sharing your live location at that point in time.
Khan further believes that this feature will increase the productivity of the entire user base given that retaining 1 billion plus daily active users, and over 1.3 billion monthly active users are quintessential for WhatsApp.
He further adds-
When we decide to build a feature, it has to solve a problem that is experienced by over a billion people. And the problem that we are looking at with live location is what you might call the rendezvous problem or the problem of meeting up in the real world. Whether you are sharing a commute or letting loved ones know you are safe, or meeting up with friends, these are experiences that are very common to us all.
