Your first thought is why you’d need to share your location with anyone. After further consideration, it makes so much sense.

Recently we were on a trip to Lisbon and one of team members got lost on the way to a meeting. Trying to describe our location and where were located wasn’t so straightforward. The easiest idea was to screengrab our location on Google Maps and send the grab via WhatsApp.

Luckily the WhatsApp developers have decided to add Live Location Sharing directly within the app itself. There are many reasons why this could be useful. If you’ve found a cool cafe, rather than sharing the cafe information with a friend, you simply share your location instead. If you’re walking around town and want a friend to join you, simply share your location and allow them to find where you are hanging out.

Set and share your location with other WhatsApp users

And that’s one advantage of the new WhatsApp location sharing function. You can choose to share your status for minutes or an hour, enabling you to move around and share the changing location on-the-move. This means you can tell a friend of your current location and move to another and they can find you without you having to stand in the same spot for the duration.

The same technology applies to WhatsApp groups, too. So, share your location and it’s shared, securely, with the entire group. Could be useful if one person decides to head out to a location first, to find it’s either too busy or closed, moves on to an alternative and wants to share this with the group. Multiple people within the group can share their locations so you can see how far you are from each other, on a map.

Location sharing is end-to-end encrypted, so you can be assured that only the people who you want to share your location will see this information.

WhatsApp claim that Live Location Sharing is available now, but then contradict themselves with it ‘rolling out in the app over the next few weeks’, so look out for an update soon if you have the app installed.

Download WhatsApp for iOS and Android devices. WhatsApp Desktop does not have the Live Location Sharing feature.