The Friends list
Beside every person in your Group is one line saying how well the app knows where they are. It is the most useful thing on the screen and the easiest to misread, so it is worth learning the four states.
The four states
| The line reads | What it means |
|---|---|
Sharing · just now | They are sharing, and their Position (what other apps call your location) arrived within the last minute |
Sharing · 3 min ago | They are sharing, and the newest Position the app has for them is three minutes old |
Last seen 12 min ago | They are still sharing, and nothing new has arrived for twelve minutes |
Not sharing | No session is running. There is nothing to see, and nothing is wrong |
Sharing · no position | A session is running and their phone has never given it a Position |
The five-minute line
Under five minutes, the line says Sharing with the age beside it. Past five minutes it changes to Last seen, and their dot on the map is drawn as a memory rather than as a live Position.
That is a change of wording, not a change of state. They have not stopped sharing. What changed is what the app is willing to claim: past five minutes it is reporting where somebody was, not where they are, and it says so rather than letting a stale dot look current.
Why a number that keeps climbing is not a bug
A phone that has gone quiet — indoors, in a tunnel, in a pocket at the back of a festival crowd — produces no new Position, so the age climbs. The app deliberately does not smooth this over: it would rather tell you the information is eleven minutes old than draw a confident dot in a place nobody has been for eleven minutes.
The app will not tell you why, and neither can anybody else. From your phone, from your friend’s Group, and from the server, a quiet phone and a phone in a bag look identical. That is the honest limit of it.
What to do about each state
Sharing · just nowor a small number of minutes. Nothing. This is the normal state.- A number that keeps climbing. Their phone is not producing positions. Message them; the app cannot tell you more. See My friend is sharing but isn’t on the map.
Not sharing. They have not started a session, or theirs has run out. Only they can start one.- Your own line is the one that looks wrong. That is a different page: My own Position is not updating.
Where they are, as well as when
Where a person’s Position falls inside a named Area of Interest, the app adds a second line naming it — 📍 at Food Court, or 📍 at Building A · Ground Floor where the Area has floors. If they are on the map but in no named Area, it says On the map instead, which is a claim about what the app knows rather than a vague answer. If their Position falls outside this Map’s picture altogether — they are sharing from across town — the row says Not on this map and no pin is drawn for them; on a Map that has not been calibrated yet, nobody can be placed, so the row says Map not calibrated instead.