Otegaru Ichi Kensaku (お手軽位置検索)

~ the goodbye ~

「いまどこですか？」, where are you now, is the text KDDI printed inside its own press diagram for this app. You sent it from one au handset to another, and if the person on the far end agreed, their position came back. That was the entire product.

KDDI opened it on 19 May 2011, free of charge and distributed through au one マーケット. There was no sign-up to complete and nothing to pay beyond packet charges. The code came from Sharp, which had written an Android app called Your location and published its source. What au shipped was that program with carrier plumbing added, a fact stated plainly in the launch release and still stated on the service page three years later.

Footnote 3 of that launch release carries the detail that matters: 「アプリケーションは一定期間の提供となります」, the application is provided for a limited period, and if it ends we will announce it inside the service. The （β版） in the name survived to the end and is still printed on the page that announced the shutdown. KDDI wrote the limit into the birth announcement. The end came at 17:00 on Tuesday 2 December 2014. No reason was attached to it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ two gates before a dot on a map ~

Getting a location out of this app meant clearing two separate checks. The first one stood permanently: each side registered the other's phone number, five numbers to a handset, and anyone absent from your list could not ask at all. KDDI's own flow diagram draws the unregistered caller as an arrow terminated with an X and the words 利用不可 beside it.

The second check ran on every request. It arrived on the other phone as a dialog asking whether to disclose a location to the person who had asked, with a yes and a no under it. You could switch that dialog off for people you trusted. Left on, it gave a friend a veto on each individual lookup. The location apps that came after mostly settled on standing permission instead, granted once and then left running.

Both ends had to be au. The launch release says so directly: you searched from another au smartphone or from an au feature phone. The request itself rode C-mail, KDDI's own message channel between handsets, and a location tool built on one carrier's message channel serves that carrier's subscriber list and nobody else's. It could not reach a docomo handset across Tokyo, never mind a phone in Ankara. What came back was never precise either. KDDI's own copy calls it 大まかな位置情報, a rough location, and on a feature phone it turned up as a latitude and longitude pair with a street address written underneath.

~ locked out of android 4.0 ~

The supported-OS line on au's page reads Android OS 1.6 or higher, and then immediately takes it back. Handsets that shipped with OS 4.0 or above, or that were updated to it, could not run the app. Android 4.0 was announced in October 2011. The app had been available for five months.

From there the audience could only shrink. Every au customer who bought a newer Android phone, or accepted an update on the one in their pocket, left the product by doing so. KDDI kept it listed for another three years and never shipped a build that cleared the gate.

~ three hundred yen a month ~

The farewell page never says why. It says what to do next, which was to subscribe to 安心ナビ at 300 yen a month before tax, or to be an au Smart Pass member and get it folded inside the 372 yen the Pass already cost. Then comes the line with the sting in it: 「お手軽位置検索（β版）」にてご登録いただいたデータは、「安心ナビ」には引き継げません. The data you registered here cannot be carried over there.

Five phone numbers is not much to type again. What mattered was what typing them again required. The other person had to register a mail address with 安心ナビ and then accept a partner registration, and the arrangement they were accepting now carried a monthly bill. KDDI's notice spells those setup steps out itself, a few lines above the sentence explaining that nothing would transfer.

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