TL;DR Google announced back in May that the newly renamed Find Hub would be adding support for satellite-based location sharing.
That’s still not here yet, but a recent app update reveals text strings that hint at how things will work.
Users will be able to share their location once every 15 minutes, with a daily limit on maximum shares.
Satellite support is changing the rules of the game when it comes to mobile connectivity, and we are still right now only in the early days of its evolution. The first hurdle was getting our phones talking to satellites hundreds of miles up in the sky. But with that nut cracked, arguably a larger challenge remains: finding a way to make everyday satellite communication practical, and not something left relegated to emergency uses. That’s already starting to happen, thanks to services like T-Satellite from T-Mobile, and earlier this year Google shared that we’d soon be using satellites to share our location with friends and family.
Alongside announcing the rebranding of Find My as the new Find Hub, Google said that it planned to integrate satellite-based location tools. But while that sounded all kinds of promising, it also left us with just a ton of practical questions, and little in the way of insight into how Google might actually be thinking of making this plan a reality.
Satellite features still aren’t available in the Find Hub — but we’re getting there. Looking through Google’s new version 3.1.399-3 release of the Find Hub app, we’ve identified a number of text strings that quite clearly reference the upcoming support.
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We start with some basic messaging that establishes how satellite connectivity will be integrated with Find Hub. When you’re sharing your location with someone else, the app should support using satellites to send a one-off ping with your location — this isn’t designed for continuous, real-time tracking, and is more like dropping a pin.
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