TL;DR Google’s Find Hub combines resources for tracking devices and sharing location with friends and family.
Users need to positively consent first before their location is shared with anyone.
The app is working to build an easy way for you to request your friends grant that access.
Smartphones are picking up new features and abilities all the time, and while some of those are pushed out to us enabled by default, others are going to require us to make the intentional choice to opt in. And while there’s usually a good reason why companies might want to be asking us for that kind of approval, it’s nonetheless a frustrating situation when you’ve decided to take advantage of some shared feature, but your friends have yet to join you.
A couple months back we looked at a new tool Google was developing to help gently nudge those people towards getting their act together, with Messages working on a system to beg your friends to enable RCS chat, and today we’ve uncovered something with similar vibes for the Find Hub.
Just like with that early evidence of how satellite location sharing will work that we just checked out, we’re looking at new changes present in version 3.1.399-3 of the Find Hub app.
Right now, this is how it looks when you share your location with someone, but they haven’t returned the favor by sharing their own location back. On your phone, you don’t see much of anything, while the person you’re sharing location with gets not one, but two prominent buttons for enabling sharing — it’s not like anyone can say that Google wasn’t giving them the opportunity.
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Passive messaging like that just isn’t always going to be enough, which is why Google may have thought it was a good idea to implement a more explicit way to request someone share their location back with you.
This functionality isn’t yet active in the Find Hub’s UI, but we’ve got an early look at a few of the screens that show how this in-progress tweak is coming together. Google is preparing to add a “Request location” button that sounds like it does exactly what it says on the tin.
We haven’t yet seen what that request looks like when it pops up on the recipient’s screen, but hopefully it’s a little more compelling that the existing “Turn on sharing” buttons that person has clearly been ignoring.
⚠️ An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
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