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More Clues About Apple's 'Find My Friends' Mobile Service

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Apr 12, 2001
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As reported by both 9to5Mac and AppleInsider, some additional evidence of Apple's work on a "Find My Friends" service has been discovered in relation to Apple's MobileMe website.

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"Find My Friends" was originally discovered as a reference back in iOS 4.3. At the time we suspected that it represented a location-based friend-finding service like Loopt and Google Latitude. The strings (embedded above) seem to confirm those suspicions:
It includes references to standard social networking functions, like a list of people a user is "following," as well as "pending" and "accepted" follower requests. The code also mentions user statuses, updates, blocking of users and removing followers.
Click to expand...
These types of services allow you to find your friends who near you at any given time by leveraging your mobile phone's GPS signal. The constant updates can broadcast your location to your friends to know who is nearby.

Apple's implementation seems very similar, and allows you to "follow" or be followed by others. This would presumably allow you to locate those you follow in real time.

Apple has yet to announce any plans to launch such a service, and given the fact that it first appeared back in iOS 4.3 could mean that Apple ultimately decided to scrap the project. Apple's patent applications have previously revealed that Apple is actively researching these type of location based mobile services.

Article Link: More Clues About Apple's 'Find My Friends' Mobile Service
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2011/09/03/more-clues-about-apples-find-my-friends-mobile-service/
It will be interesting to see how they intend to implement this. If it requires your phone to use its GPS at all times, it's not really usable, as it consumes too much power. They should come up with a system where your phone only activates the GPS when one of your followers wants to find you.
 
For your enjoyment, I now present 500 people complaining based on the absurd assumption that this will not be optional :)

And another 100 conspiracy theorists saying that dark powers could use this feature if Apple releases it... even though it would make much more sense for them to use hidden software for that, not a user-facing feature! (P.S. Does your wristwatch have a GPS? Are you sure it doesn’t? If I were a James Bond villain, I'd rather track people using a device nobody pays attention to—not an iPhone that hackers around the world have their microscopes and packet-sniffers aimed at.)

Oh well, I’ll still be happy to have this occasionally when meeting friends at a large event.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8C148)

Sounds like a great service. My assumption would be an opt-it/opt-out and periodic location updates(every 15-30m?) or upon request.
If they could open it to non-apple devices(not likely) that would be an awesome way to interact with your friends.
 
I'm not sure if I'd want people quite literally following me. Following on Twitter's fine... but not so sure about actually following in real life.

I dunno... could turn out to be something good. But from previous Apple attempts at the social scene (Ping), I'm not that excited.
 
JTToft said:
It will be interesting to see how they intend to implement this. If it requires your phone to use its GPS at all times, it's not really usable, as it consumes too much power. They should come up with a system where your phone only activates the GPS when one of your followers wants to find you.
Click to expand...

Apple already offers GPS as a multitasking service.

http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/multitasking.html

Apps that use GPS can continue to run in the background. Not only do they constantly update your position, they can also give you spoken turn-by-turn directions even as you listen to music (the music volume lowers while the directions are spoken). It’s perfect for social networking apps, too. Now you and your friends can find each other even when you’re not actively using the app.
Click to expand...
 
nagromme said:
For your enjoyment, I now present 500 people complaining based on the absurd assumption that this will not be optional :)

And another 100 conspiracy theorists saying that dark powers could use this feature if Apple releases it... even though it would make much more sense for them to use hidden software for that, not a user-facing feature! (P.S. Does your wristwatch have a GPS? Are you sure it doesn’t? If I were a James Bond villain, I'd rather track people using a device nobody pays attention to—not an iPhone that hackers around the world have their microscopes and packet-sniffers aimed at.)

Oh well, I’ll still be happy to have this occasionally when meeting friends at a large event.
Click to expand...

I would assume it is optional and you could turn it off.

But personally I would say oh look yet another idea in iOS 5 that Apple stole from Google (latitude)
"Year of the copycats" Apple really was talking about itself there. Just another item to add to the growing list.
 
Rodimus Prime said:
But personally I would say oh look yet another idea in iOS 5 that Apple stole from Google (latitude)

"Year of the copycats" Apple really was talking about itself there. Just another item to add to the growing list.
Click to expand...

It's ok. Apple will finally make them matter. The bigger the list, the better.

And you know what Google will do about it? Absolutely nothing. Because they don't have an IP leg to stand on.
 
nagromme said:
For your enjoyment, I now present 500 people complaining based on the absurd assumption that this will not be optional :)

And another 100 conspiracy theorists saying that dark powers could use this feature if Apple releases it... even though it would make much more sense for them to use hidden software for that, not a user-facing feature! (P.S. Does your wristwatch have a GPS? Are you sure it doesn’t? If I were a James Bond villain, I'd rather track people using a device nobody pays attention to—not an iPhone that hackers around the world have their microscopes and packet-sniffers aimed at.)

Oh well, I’ll still be happy to have this occasionally when meeting friends at a large event.
Click to expand...

Actually you can BET that this will be apart of iMessage.
For this to take over where BBM left off this will integrate with:
Ability to search (long lost family/friends on OSX/iOS)
Ability to invite to users to Games
Ability to share iCloud Photos/Music previews/possibly Contacts (bye-bye vcard).
So much more to be incredibly social and ability to be private.

Looking forward to this implementation and I'm completely done with BlackBerry ... its work only.
 
I think there is a very big chance it will be in iOS 5. Apple always holds back a few features from devs so they can have something new to announce when they introduce the new iPhone.

I think we will see Find my Friends, deep voice integration and probably a couple more features.
 
I guess it wouldn't make sense to just call your friends if you wanted to talk or see them. It would be much better to find them by GPS. I wonder if it will cost .99 to find each friend? That would be magical.
 
Might be a fun feature to turn on if you are doing something like bar hopping -- and don't want to text each and every friend who hasn't met up with you yet where you are.

I predict many jealous boyfriends/girlfriends will *require* their partners to use this. :)
 
AIP5 said:
I'm not sure if I'd want people quite literally following me. Following on Twitter's fine... but not so sure about actually following in real life.

I dunno... could turn out to be something good. But from previous Apple attempts at the social scene (Ping), I'm not that excited.
Click to expand...


yea i am with you.. i was looking at google latitude and it weirded me out that i could see where my friends are and thinking they could do the same.. kinda scary and big brotherish
 
JTToft said:
- I know. But how is this relevant to my post?
Click to expand...

I think he means that in iOS currently there is already background management of an application's battery use of GPS along with settings for the user to turn a particular programs use of GPS on or off.
 
Provided the GPS works well and all your friends have an iPhone this would be great at an outdoor concert venue or a festival..All your friends could find each other and see what everybody wants to do.
 
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