My own Position is not updating
Your own Position (what other apps call your location) has stopped moving, or has faded on the map. There are exactly two reasons, they need completely different things from you, and the app tells you which one it is in the line under the capsule at the top of the map.
Read that line first. Everything else on this page follows from it.
The line says: Location is off — FriendTrack can’t place you
This one is yours to fix, and nothing will improve until you do. The app is asking your phone for a Position and the phone is refusing — because location is switched off for the whole device, or because FriendTrack was never given permission, or because permission was withdrawn later.
The line comes with Open Settings. Tap it, and check these three in order:
- Location is on for the phone itself. If the whole device has location switched off, no app can place you, and nothing FriendTrack does will change that.
- FriendTrack is allowed to use location. While using the app is enough — the app never asks for more, and granting more changes nothing.
- Precise location is allowed, if your phone separates that from approximate. An approximate Position is far too coarse for a venue map: it can put you in the wrong Area of Interest entirely.
Come back to the map. It catches up by itself as soon as the first Position arrives, and there is nothing to press afterwards.
The line says: 🛰 No GPS signal — your position may be out of date
This one is not yours to fix, and waiting is the correct action. Permission is fine and the app is asking properly; your phone simply has nothing to answer with. It happens:
- indoors, under a roof, in a basement, in a car park;
- in a tunnel or a lift;
- in the first minute or two after location was switched back on, while the phone finds satellites again.
What to do: move somewhere with a view of the sky, or wait. If you need it now, stepping outside for thirty seconds usually does it.
Notice what this line claims and what it does not. It says your Position may be out of date. It does not say your friends cannot see you, because that is a different question — see below.
The two lines never appear together
Only one line shows at a time, and the one you can act on wins. That is deliberate: being told to check your settings while sitting in a tunnel is exactly the confusion the two states exist to prevent. So if you are reading 🛰 No GPS signal, your permissions are not the problem, and you can stop looking at them.
What your Group sees while this is happening
The app will not claim a Position it cannot vouch for, so while yours is too old it sends nothing rather than re-sending a stale one as if it were current.
To your friends, that looks like the age beside your name climbing — Sharing · 4 min ago, then
past five minutes Last seen 6 min ago — and your dot drawn as a memory rather than as a live
Position. You have not stopped sharing, the session is still running, and there is nothing to
restart. When a Position arrives, everything catches up at once.
Your friends’ dots are not affected by this
This is worth saying plainly, because the two get confused. Losing your own GPS signal changes what the app can say about you. It does not fade, delay or invalidate the people on your map: their positions come from their own phones over the network, and a tunnel of yours is not a tunnel of theirs.
If a friend is the one who has stopped moving, it is their phone, and the page for that is My friend is sharing but isn’t on the map.
A worked example
You are at an indoor arena. You started sharing before you went in, and half an hour later somebody says they cannot see where you are.
- You open FriendTrack and look at the top of the map. The capsule says
Sharing · no position, so the session is live. - Under it, the line reads 🛰 No GPS signal — your position may be out of date. So permissions are fine, and there is nothing in settings to change.
- You walk out to the concourse. Within a few seconds the line disappears, the countdown comes back, and your friends see you again.
Had the line said Location is off — FriendTrack can’t place you instead, step 3 would have been useless — the fix would have been Open Settings, and no amount of walking about would have helped.
The one thing not to do
Do not stop sharing and start again. It changes nothing about your phone’s ability to produce a Position, and it costs you the session and the length of time you had picked.