Whatsapp is well known to try various features on their app and actually succeed. Starting with the blue ticks to the weird ass emojis in the recent update, they have impressed us and also let us down sometimes. Whatsapp the Facebook-owned messaging service app has over 1billion downloads on the Play store with over 1.3 billion monthly active users.
Whatsapp allowed to share the location before also, but it didn’t give us live updates. The location is shared at a chat level, this means you can share your live location with your friends or family in your personal chats or also in your group chats. So the next time you plan to go out with your friends and you are running late make sure you don’t lie about where you are.
The live location sharing feature was announced a week back and will be rolled out to both iOS and Android in the coming weeks.
How does it work?
Clicking on the attach icon in the chat you can hit location and then you get to choose the duration of time for which you want to share the location. The options are 15 minutes, 1hour and 8 hours or custom. This update doesn’t mean you cannot share offline location.
It also allows you to manually stop sharing your live location any time you want. The live shares will show up as thumbnails on the Whatsapp chats. You can switch to various views, as in Satellite and Terrain. This also allows to check the live traffic which actually is a pretty good feature, if you are about to step out of your house.
Since enabling location eats up a lot of juice I wonder how this feature will be a hit. Let’s see what else Whatsapp has up its sleeves. What do you think about this update? Let us know by leaving a comment down below.
