Google is up to discontinue its emergency location sharing app Trusted Contacts. The search engine giant brought Trusted Contacts very long ago to compete with Apple. Trusted Contacts lets you share your whereabouts with whom you want. It may be your GPS location or if you’re online, friends and family members can request your status to see if you’re safe. If you do not respond within five minutes, the app will automatically broadcast your location to that specific contact. In case your phone is switched off, your contact will get your last location.
Google will discontinue Trusted Contacts in December. The company has already taken it from Google Play Store. Real time location sharing is possible in Google Maps since 2017. The only problem with Google Maps is that you have to opt-in for constant tracking and sharing your location with other people all the time instead of only broadcasting it to loved ones.
Although Trusted Contacts was designed to be a personal safety app,it has its own rife with potential misuses. This app has some privacy issues and these issues can be exploited through the application’s user interface.
Google had been planning to improve the functions on Google Maps for a very long time. These functions are not so useful. It is possible that Trusted Contacts doesn’t have a large user base.
“More than three years ago, we launched the Trusted Contacts app to help users know where their loved ones are,” Google said in a statement. Due to the increasing growth and popularity of Google Maps, the company announced to shut down its operations.
“For this reason, the Trusted Contacts application disappears today from the App Store and Play Store, and will no longer be available as of December 1, 2020. If you have the application installed on your device, you can continue to use it until then,” Google informed through a mail.
Trusted Contacts will go out on 1 December. You have time till 1 December to use it and share your location to trusted people. After 1 December, the app will stop working and hence no location can be traced through it.
Google is constantly working to make its products very optimized and fully loaded with features from multiple apps. The company doesn’t want too many apps; currently it has a lot of web tools to work with. A dedicated tool for a small phone might not work properly and making a dedicated server for it will cost more than enough.
