Start Sharing with a Group

Nobody can see your Position (what other apps call your location) until you start Sharing, and then only the Groups you started it with, and only for as long as you chose. There is no way to be sharing by accident: starting always takes a Group, a length of time, and a button that says both.

Before you start

You need to be in a Group with at least one other person. A Group is the set of people a sharing session is with — you can be in several, and each one is separate.

You also need to have given FriendTrack permission to use your location. The app asks the first time you start Sharing, so you do not have to arrange it in advance.

Start it from the map

1. On the map screen, tap the capsule at the top. When you are not sharing it reads Not sharing · tap to share. A sheet opens, titled Share your location.
2. Under SHARE WITH, tick the Groups you want to share with. You can tick more than one. If you are in only one Group, it is already ticked.
3. Under SHARE FOR, tap a length of time. There are five: 1h, 2h, 4h, 8h and Until stop. None is picked for you.
4. Tap the button at the bottom. It says exactly what it will do — Share with Family for 2h, or Share with 2 groups for 2h — and until you have picked both a Group and a length it says what is missing instead (Pick a group, Pick a duration).
5. If this is the first time, your phone asks whether FriendTrack may use your location. Allow it. While using the app is enough — you do not need to grant the wider “always” option, and the app does not ask for it.

That is the whole act. Sharing starts immediately, the sheet closes, and the capsule shows the time remaining.

If one of several Groups does not start — a bad connection, usually — the sheet stays open, the ones that did start move to the top under SHARING NOW, and the ones that did not stay ticked so you can try again with one tap. A message names them.

Start it from the Group’s own screen

1. Open the Groups tab and tap the Group you want to share with.
2. Find SHARE FOR and tap a length of time.

This starts Sharing with that one Group straight away, and the Group’s screen changes to say Sharing your location with the time remaining under it. It is also the place to change the length of a session that is already running — the map’s sheet only starts and stops.

Choosing the Sharing Duration

The five lengths are not a preference to be set once — you pick one every time you start, and the app does not remember your last one.

You tap	Your Position is shared
1h	For one hour from now
2h	For two hours from now
4h	For four hours from now
8h	For eight hours from now
Until stop	With no end time, until you stop it yourself

Pick the shortest one that covers what you are doing. When the time runs out, sharing ends by itself and you do not have to remember anything — which is the point of a Sharing Duration rather than an on/off switch.

Until stop is part of FriendTrack Pro. Choosing it without a subscription opens the upgrade screen instead of starting a session, so nothing starts behind your back. The four timed lengths are free.

Changing your mind while a session is running

On the Group’s own screen, tapping a different length while sharing moves the end time and nothing else. The session keeps running, your friends do not see an interruption, and there is no need to stop first.

Tapping the length that is already in effect does nothing at all. That is deliberate: it would otherwise be far too easy to restart or extend a session by tapping the thing that describes it.

A worked example

You are meeting three friends at a festival at six, and you expect to be there until midnight.

1. On the map you tap the capsule, tick Festival — the Group the four of you are in — and tap 8h.
2. The button reads Share with Festival for 8h. You tap it.
3. The capsule counts down from eight hours.
4. At half past eleven you all leave together, so you stop it by hand rather than waiting — see Stop Sharing.

Had you picked 1h at six because you were unsure, you would have opened the Group’s own screen at seven and tapped 4h to extend it, and the session would have carried on without a break.

When you started sharing and nobody can see you

If your phone refuses location access, sharing still starts — the session is live, and your Group is holding you as sharing — but there is no Position for it to carry. The app says so, with a message titled Nobody can see you yet, and points you at your phone’s settings.

This is worth understanding rather than dismissing: the session and the Position are two different things, and it is possible to have one without the other. What that looks like afterwards, and how to fix it, is on My own Position is not updating.

What happens next

• Your friends in that Group see you on the map, with how long ago your Position was last updated.
• You can start a separate session with another Group, on its own length of time — open the capsule again and tick it under ALSO SHARE WITH. See share with one Group and not another.
• If you are not in any Group yet, the sheet says so and offers Create a Group and Join with an Invite Code. Come back to the map afterwards and your new Group is listed.
• The map screen shows a capsule at the top with the time remaining, which is how you check later that it is still running: Am I still sharing?