Find My Friends

~ the eulogy ~

This app carried a requirement that no feature list ever mentioned, which is that everybody you wanted to see had to own an iPhone. In Turkey through the 2010s that was never true of any group I was in. The phones around a table here were mixed and mostly Android, with Nokia hanging on years past the point the American numbers had written it off, so an app that assumed a single-vendor address book was solving a problem for a room I was not sitting in.

Apple announced it on 4 October 2011 at the iPhone 4S event and released it on 12 October, a few hours ahead of iOS 5 itself. For the first four years it was a separate App Store download, which is worth holding onto, because it meant location sharing was something you went and fetched on purpose. From iOS 9 in 2015 it shipped preinstalled and could not be deleted.

The design was simple and it was the right simple. You asked someone to share and once they accepted you saw them on a map. You could share for a fixed window or leave it running with no end date, and the fixed window is the option that carried the whole product, because a share that expires by itself is one people say yes to.

Later it learned to notify you when a contact arrived somewhere or left it, and in October 2015 it turned up on iCloud.com so you could check from a browser without a phone in your hand.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

Google had done this first and got the timing wrong. Latitude launched in February 2009 and was switched off on 9 August 2013, four years before the Apple version reached anything like its peak. The difference was not the software. Latitude lived inside Google Maps and had to be found, while Find My Friends was a plain icon on the home screen with a name that said what it did.

The check-in generation lost the same argument at the same time. Gowalla and Loopt both asked you to perform your location, tapping a button to announce that you had arrived somewhere. Find My Friends asked for nothing after the first yes. Passive beat active and it was not close.

~ the funny part ~

Within weeks of launch the app was being used for exactly the thing everybody had predicted. The coverage in late 2011 was full of people working out that a silent and accurate feed of a family member's position changes a relationship whether or not anyone meant it to.

Apple's answer was consent, and it was a real answer as far as it went. The person being followed had granted it and could revoke it in two taps. What that does not cover is the case where saying no is not socially available, which is most of the interesting cases. The app did not invent the pressure. It did make the pressure very easy to act on.

~ what it became ~

On 19 September 2019, with iOS 13 and macOS Catalina, Apple merged Find My Friends and Find My iPhone into one app called Find My. The icon changed and the standalone app went away. No capability was actually lost, which is why this shutdown got almost no coverage at all.

The merge mattered later. Putting people and hardware behind the same interface is what made AirTags legible in 2021, since finding a thing was already the same gesture as finding a person. This is one of the rare graves where the product did not fail. It got absorbed, and the idea it introduced, that your location is a standing subscription your family holds rather than something you announce, is now the default on both phone platforms.

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