Google Maps offers the ability to temporarily share your location with friends and family. Location sharing is now being supplemented with new features. This is how you use them.
There are many apps that allow you to share your real-time location with family or friends. But not many people know that such a function is already built into Google Maps. With location sharing, you can share your current location in real time with selected people and contacts who also use Google Maps.
Now Google is adding a useful feature to the function: You can now be notified automatically as soon as a person who shares their location with you reaches a certain location. Below we summarize everything you need to know about sharing your location on Google Maps.
Google Maps: This is how location sharing works
You can share your location in the Google Maps app. There, Google gives you the opportunity to share your location with other people for a certain period of time. You can send the relevant link anywhere; the only requirement is that the other person also uses Google Maps.
Location sharing can last from 1 hour to 12 hours, or stay on until you turn it off. You can specify this when creating the location share. Interestingly, Google also shares the battery level of the smartphone and the means of transport as well as saved locations, such as home or work.
New Feature: Notification at certain locations
Google added a useful feature in September 2022. With the new update, you can set the contact you share your location with to receive a notification when you enter or leave a specific location. This happens completely automatically, so that the other person can see directly as soon as you start your way home from work, for example.
You can choose a different notification location for each person you share your location with, and you can set multiple locations for one person to automatically send notifications. You can also set it up so that the recipient can choose which locations to be notified of.
Unfortunately, the corresponding update has not yet arrived on our devices. However, we will soon add the corresponding steps to the instructions. Below we will show you how to activate location sharing in Google Maps.
Finished! Now your location will be shared with the selected person for the specified time. You can stop location sharing early in the same window, or send a mutual location sharing request to the other person.
In another guide, we will show you how to use Google Maps to save your parking space.
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