WhatsApp brings the live location sharing feature to Android and iOS

WhatsApp live location sharing feature to Android and iOS

Facebook-owned WhatsApp has introduced yet another feature for its massive user base of over 1 million. After many speculations, the messaging service has come up with the live location sharing feature.

Already, WhatsApp gives you the option of sharing your current location with your contacts but it is a one-time and static share. The main difference between the existing feature and the live location sharing is that the latter is dynamic and offers real-time updates on your location when WhatsApp is running in the background.

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The location is shared at the chat level tipping that you can share your live location in either group or individual chats. When you share your live location in a chat just by tapping on the Attach icon or Plus icon on your Android phone or iPhone, you will get an option to choose the duration for which the share will be active. You can choose from preset options such as 15 minutes, 1 hour that is the default option and 8 hours. You can also leave a comment if you want.

If you do not wish to share your live location, you can choose the one-time static location sharing as well that exists right now. After choosing the live location sharing duration, you can stop the same manually within a chat at any time.

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There will be a new option in the Account Privacy Settings that will show you can overview of all the WhatsApp chats that you are sharing your live location in at that instant.

The live location shares will be displayed as thumbnails in the WhatsApp chats and show the initial location and a 'Live until' time. When you tap on the 'View live location', you will be taken to the map where you can see the current location of the users who have shared their live location with you in the chat. When you view on a map, you can choose between Satellite or Terrain view and see the live traffic data as well.

Below the map, there will be names of those users who have shared their location in a list view. There will be a timestamp as well pointing out the freshness of the location data. You can choose a name on the list or the specific person's profile picture on the map to zoom in on that location. To communicate with the specific contact on WhatsApp, you can tap on the 'i' button next to the contact.