Hear Me Out: Find My Friends is better than any social media app

I was at a bar the other night when a friend and I were wondering what to do next. “Shall we see where everyone is?” she said, pulling out her phone. I fully expected her to leave a few lines on WhatsApp. Instead, she opened Find My Friends, the tracking app that’s automatically built into iPhones. “A friend of ours was about 15 minutes away,” she said, showing me the screen. I could see a small circle with the first letter of his name. “Let’s see if he wants to hang.”

That’s not unusual. In the three years since I traded in my iPhone for an Android device before going back to an iPhone, everyone has started sharing their location. Another friend of mine follows about five people, each in different locations around the UK. “There’s something really comforting about it,” she explained. “Look,” she said, sending me a screenshot. “I like to see where my friends are, for example Oh, everyone is home, or everyone is at work.” My Gen Z colleague Riann said her friends do this “all the time” for “entertainment.” “They’ll say: ‘Oh, so that’s why you were in West London?’ And I’m like, ‘How did you know I was in West London?'”

Part of me is surprised. Location sharing used to be considered an invasive thing – a type of tactic used by controlling partners, or perhaps as a safety measure for parents. No longer. When I was researching this article, I heard from many people that it helps them feel safer and more confident that their friends got home safely; It’s a way to get around the whole “text me when you get home” thing. Others told me it simply makes their social lives easier, from coordinating group meetings to making sure people know they’re home and available. Another told me that it helps her feel closer to her friends. “I feel like it’s a badge of honor,” she explained. “Like the next level of friendship.” At least three people told me they used it to socialize.

One of the most interesting things I discovered was that many people use it to avoid having to text when they are late. “I don’t have to update them,” one person told me, “because they can just see for themselves.” I hear that all the time. “We’re all always late and don’t trust each other,” a friend explained. Gone are the days when you could lie about being out and about when you were actually getting your hair done. FMF is like a big, watchful eye hanging over you, except the eye is all your friends telling you to hurry up already.