What Sharing costs your battery
A sharing session keeps your phone’s location hardware working, so it does cost battery. What it costs depends far more on how much you are moving than on how long the session lasts.
Where the cost comes from
Your phone works out a Position (what other apps call your location), FriendTrack sends it, and your friends’ phones draw it. The expensive half of that is the first one, and it is expensive in proportion to how often it happens.
So the app asks for positions less often when there is less to say:
- Moving — positions often, because the dot on your friends’ map would otherwise be wrong.
- Standing still — much less often, because a Position that has not changed does not need sending again.
Sharing with three Groups costs the same as sharing with one. The location work happens once on your phone whatever the number of Groups, so a second session is free.
What FriendTrack does as the battery drops
Two things happen on their own, without you setting anything:
| Charge | What changes |
|---|---|
| At or below 50% | The app stops asking for the most precise positions it can get |
| Below 20% | Positions are asked for less often, and the app says so: Battery below 20% — reducing location update frequency |
| Below 10% | Less often again, with the blunter wording: Low battery — location updates are less frequent |
None of this stops sharing, and none of it hides you from your Group. What it costs is precision and freshness — your dot may sit a little behind where you actually are.
Plugged in, none of it applies. While the phone is charging, the app spends the battery freely, because it is not yours to save.
What you can do
- Pick a shorter Sharing Duration. A session that ends by itself at the right time is the single most effective thing, and it is what the lengths of time exist for.
- Stop when you are done rather than leaving a session running for the rest of the day. See Stop Sharing.
- Do not use Until stop as a default. It is convenient for a day out with a charger and expensive as a habit.
- Bring a power bank to a festival. No app-level setting beats this, and every phone on the site is in the same position.
What does not help
Closing FriendTrack does not save battery while a session is running — the session is what costs, not the app being on screen, and on iPhone swiping the app away stops the sharing altogether. See does it keep sharing in the background?.