What a surprise just in time as with my friends we have just published our simple location sharing app called TeleportMe :-). It's currently available for iPhone (update upcoming this week) and this month should be also released on Android.

Please visit http://TeleportMe.to if you are are looking for a super simple on foot navigation (just follow the arrow) with ability to save places (called teleports) and share them easily with your friends through text, email, facebook or twitter. Any comments are welcome. We will be also enabling users to use nice vanilla links to places such as http://TeleportMe.to/StarbucksGdynia

We planned to show it on HN after releasing Android and few updates as not all planned features are already there, but screw that

Looks nice. Just installed on iPhone 5, latest iOS but it crashes if I want to share the location via the mail button. also your site is really slow... (HN traffic?)

Thank you for some nice words.

Crash: we will take a look into that today, thank's for the tip.

Website: it's launchrock and yes it's slow. We've just removed one script, should be better (but not perfect). We will have to final

In any case I'm pasting direct appstore link: https://itunes.apple.com/app/teleportme/id663199958

Just a thought but your icon... I was expecting a icon or visual along the lines of StarTrek. Would be cool. EDIT: Quick sketch for icon concept: http://i.imgur.com/kJyDm5G.jpg Edit #2: the reaction below is not about the sketch, just the possibility of StarTrek like visuals.

We looked at this concept but results were not so good. But there is some visual effect after teleportation is completed. We will work on more that in further releases. For now we have to address some issuess and Android :-)

P.S. My friend just tested all sharing options on his iPhone5 - worked fine. It must have been some random crash in your case. Nevertheless it will be visible in our statistics.

Don't freak out when you see the results. I tested it about 6 times ;-) Will reboot tonight and try again. (I'm on wifi if that matters). Sharing with other service was okay.

I added a sketch to my top comment.

Thanks! We will take a fresh look at our design after a short break :-)

P.S. regarding 6 crashes during mail share - we've tested it again while connected to wifi, everything is working OK. Neverthless our ios dev is aware of this and will take a look into stats

FYI: today we will be uploading the first update for iPhone. hope you like it :-) I encourage you to follow us on www.facebook.com/TeleportMe or @TeleportMeApp on Twitter to be up to date.

Surprisingly, this is the only Google service I did not want to go away. My wife and I use it frequently every work day. She is an animal control officer here in Houston, and Latitude is the way we keep in touch with where we are. The job is dangerous enough that I like to know her current location frequently just to make sure she is alright. She's on a windows 7 OS phone, I'm on an android... so a lot current-day applications are out of the question. Maybe it's time I code my own location services for us that would be more accurate, frequent, and private.

Competition in the market is a great thing and I welcome more competitors, but you're exactly right. The entire mobile market is completely fragmented. Whether you use iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, or any of the other competitors, you've likely experienced an app you'd love to install but it doesn't exist for your platform. Linux users are used to struggling with a developer to try to get a port when programs were made for Windows only. Now we're at the stage where many great programs are only written for half the market. At least on Linux you can use Wine for many things, or run a VM at worst.

When we made the move to mobile devices, we took a major step backwards in the maturity of technology. Some days I miss the simplicity of only having to pick between Windows Mobile and Palm OS when choosing a mobile audience.

> Whether you use iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, or any of the other competitors, you've likely experienced an app you'd love to install but it doesn't exist for your platform. Linux users are used to struggling with a developer to try to get a port when programs were made for Windows only.

Try being a Linux user on a PowerPC box.

I hope developers, most of which have become mobile developers by now, have now understood that open protocols are much more important than application availability.

Other way around, more likely. Everybody's abandoning open protocols - Google has functionally dropped RSS and their instant messaging protocol, for example. The modern approach is to avoid the protocol and offer a massive cloud-based service, first-party apps, and maybe an API for a little while when you're in the growth state (kill the API when your apps have every feature you want them to have).

I said "developers", not "businesses".

It may makes commercial sense for businesess to act like doubt (I seriously doubt that holds in the long run), but the more they do that, the more private developers understand the importance of open protocols.

Use Glympse, it's awesome and is compatible with a few different devices.

Great, thanks for the suggestion. I'll set us up on it tonight and see how it works.

Another one of those people who uses it to track their spouse. Handy to find out where they are. Not in a creepy way, it just makes me feel more in tune and connected.

Tried out the G+ version just now, pretty shit in comparison. The feature set it pretty non existent, I can't take advantage of Maps' directions and there doesn't seem to be a way to pop their location out onto the main Maps app. Poor form Google :( At least make the replacing solution on par.

"Tried out the G+ version just now, pretty shit in comparison"

I used latitude to do coordinate based geolocation. So on the map of the park, I see my spouse is around one mile from the intersection of the red hiking trail and the blue hiking trail, OK I'll head over that direction and we'll meet up for lunch.

In the G+ app, at least so far at a glance, I can only check into street addresses and the like. Or I can write reviews. Thanks, I already know I'm at the state park, and I don't want to check into the gas station across the street from the entrance.

Its very interesting that geolocation is focusing on "asphalt people" and abandoning outdoorsmen. Its depressing there are "geo" apps that have the worldview that human beings can only physically move via paved roads and airports.

I always wanted this to actually function correctly. It worked great on my Android phone but syncing locations with my wife on her iPhone was problematic at best. It never worked. G+ between the two is also "iffy".

One side of me admires Google for all that they do for "free" but I sometimes wish they would put the phone users in the customer role and maybe these products would evolve.

Am I the only one that would like to see a shared platform with documents, messaging, and location?

I would GLADLY pay a monthly fee to sync up our family between Android,iPhone, and web. Things like, grocery lists, to-do lists, events, photos, reference documents, and the ability to see where we are so we can plan the day w/out having to ask "Where are you?" or me sending a text every day, "OMW home". They're all there now, with things like Google Docs, Evernote, Dropbox, etc, but with kids and a non-tech minded wife, the pieces don't fall into place easy.

Free? I paid 600 for my phone directly from Google and my wife paid 700 from hers. Doesn't seem much free now.

Won't that require the person you're sharing with to be on G+? Currently I share with family who has no interest in that by embedding.

https://latitude.google.com/latitude/b/0/apps

Darnit - I _did_ find this useful. On a walking holiday with my family recently, and we were able to meet up with each other very easily through Latitude, despite being in the middle of nowhere.

Yes, same here. But there's probably useful alternatives.

as..... ?

Only one I know of is Glympse https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.glympse.an...

Glympse. It's awesome and I use it a lot and it works great.

I use it to keep track of my own location and have been since the iPhone app was released way back when and I'm sad to see this go. It's been great to be able to relive my travels and is particularly useful when trying to geotag photos.

Are there any location-tracking alternatives (I don't care about sharing it with friends) for iOS that offer KML/GPX export and are battery-friendly?

This was my main concern too, but it looks like you can still keep track of you location history. That functionality is getting folded into maps.

My friends and I use Glympse. (Android and iOS)

edit: I've just noticed that Glympse has been recommended a few times in this thread already. I predict downloads for Glympse will sky-rocket over the coming days / weeks.

I have Glympse on my Windows Phone. It doesn't do any exporting that you know of though, right?

How does Glympse make money?

Good question. I don't know.

I try to be conscious and not buy the new gadget/car year. I'm still holding up a nexus one. Working around all the hardware bugs... But i probably will not be able to install the huge g+ crap app just for latitude because this phone has like few hundred megabytes for apps..

Maybe this opensource app will be of some use for someone:

http://www.gpsautoresponder.com/

It takes a different approach to sharing location: Anyone with the possession of the generated link can get the device's location and the device owner is notified about it.

The android app and the web service are both open-source so you can improve it and even host this on your own server and have the ultimate privacy.

Somewhat understandable, but that doesn't mean I don't hate the fact this has been 'moved' to Google+ now. I'm afraid a lot of my friends won't take the time to set this up in the (bloated, compared to maps) Google+ app.

And when you think about it, why shouldn't the location of your friends not be just another layer in the maps app? Seems like a logical place to be able to find this kind of information.

I completely agree. Google+ was meant to enhance all of Google’s products, adding social features. What Google seem to be doing is the opposite.

Google+ is first and foremost meant to be a serious competitor to Facebook, but hasn't been able to overcome Facebooks gigantic lead in the network effects.

But Google really, really wants to break into that market. Now what's happening is simply that they're sacrificing their less profitable services in order to force people to start using Google+, in an attempt to get over that network effect threshold.

> Google+ is first and foremost meant to be a serious competitor to Facebook

Complete nonsense. Google aren't competing with Facebook directly at all! What they are doing is making Google+ the backend for any person to person interaction across their services. Instead of caring about massive amounts of features, they're just enabling all of their existing products, slimming and integrating them where possible.

If people can't be bothered to open an app and tap on the screen a few times then really nobody should be aiming at that market. Wanting a system where you just mash a button on your phone and it magically works is detrimental to actual useful features.

> Complete nonsense. Google aren't competing with Facebook directly at all!

Like hell they aren't.

> What they are doing is making Google+ the backend for any person to person interaction across their services.

I.e. a competition to Facebook.

> If people can't be bothered to open an app and tap on the screen a few times then really nobody should be aiming at that market. Wanting a system where you just mash a button on your phone and it magically works is detrimental to actual useful features.

I can't even tell what that's a strawman of.

> Google wants it to be the backend to the various features like Maps, Search, Mail. Facebook on the other hand wants to be the frontend, the site that you go to.

When Google cancels the separate service and folds it into G+, as with Latitude, as with Reader, then it becomes the frontend as well. I fail to see a substantial difference.

> Google have made it very clear what they're doing and why they're doing it. Perhaps view some of the session videos from IO.

Perhaps start entertaining the notion that what people say they do (and especially why) isn't necessarily what they do (and especially why).

I hope this will give rise to some replacement services; Latitude was actually pretty useful. I'm still wondering why they didn't implement "asking" for locations via push? That would save a lot of battery compared to updating in intervals and would be a lot more accurate.

They sort of did - they had a "request check-in" function. It never worked very well.

They also had an accelerated and supposedly more accurate tracking option on demand (i.e. I could request my wife's location to be updated "in real time"). That never worked very well and was removed.

That's strange — I've always had the impression that the battery usage of GPS was the main obstacle for location tracking services, so that any way to sidestep expensive polling would be a greatly welcomed remedy. I can't imagine that this would be technically impossible.

Latitude is just being merged into G+. I can't see any features that are being killed.

I haven't used G+' location features a lot so far, but if they are anything like Facebook's, they certainly don't replace Latitude. This comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6019298) seems to affirm this.

Moving to g+ is the same as killing.

Its the same with sites that only have a Facebook login. Goodbye.

I don't think you can track your location history with G+.

Unsurprising, the application doesn't fit in with the new styles, doesn't behave correctly with less-than-perfect location data, doesn't understand multiple location sources.

I was quite a fan of finding how far I'd walked, but Google Now tells me that once a month now.

> I was quite a fan of finding how far I'd walked, but Google Now tells me that once a month now.

I compared the results of my phone's pedometer function (which seems to be quite accurate) to Google Now's walk reports, and the distances Google Now gave were wrong by an order of magnitude ... soooo, pretty much useless... ><

[I've no idea how Google Now tries to calculate this, but whatever method it uses seems to be absolutely awful...]

Oh, that's a pity - what app do you use to do that?

It's one of the pre-installed (and undeletable etc) vendor apps on my Sharp 200SH (and doesn't seem to be in the play store)... unlike most vendor apps, this one is quite good (accurate, invisible, keeps a nice history, and seems to use no measurable power).

I don't know exactly how it works, but I think it uses the accelerometer to count steps like a traditional pedometer.

There seem to be a ton of other pedometer apps in the play store, though I don't know how well they work.

Sigh. Latitude was easy to use and quite handy to track (flight following mode) friends and relatives on long distance trips. G+ is nice, but a huge amount of overkill just to get that back.

That's a good opportunity to explore more secure (perhaps P2P-based) alternatives, now that we know where all this information ends up at.

Ugg, yet another mobile device hostile website

There's always MyTracks on Android.