Google’s new Find My feature for people is worse than its old Find My for people

What’s old is new again with Google, always. As part of the March Feature Drop for Android phones, Google announced that it was bringing people finding to its existing Find My Device app. Since I’d been using Google Maps location sharing for years, I wondered if this would be a duplicate feature, the same thing, or different/better. So I waited for people finding to pop up in the Find My Device app on my phone and started testing.

The positive? It works, and Google didn’t create an additional solution; it basically integrated this with the existing Maps location sharing for people but made it also available in the Find My Device app so you have one central place to track your things and your people. The negative? Why did it take a whole year to add what is essentially just a quick copy/paste of an existing feature, and why is it missing a few extra options that Maps has? Let’s delve in.

Setting up and testing Find My Device for people

If you’ve received the update to v3.1.277 of the Find My Device app, you probably have the new People tab at the bottom. It’s marked as a beta, which is surprising given that all of the functionality literally existed for years in Google Maps already. But if Google wants to pretend this is still new and in testing, well, let’s all pretend.

There are two sub-tabs here, one to start sharing your location with people and another for checking the location of those who’ve shared it with you. For the purposes of this test, I started fresh and removed all my shares in Google Maps and set up location sharing with my husband from the Find My Device app.

After reading a few explanations, the new interface for sharing my location popped up. Just like in Maps, I could set how long I wanted to share my location for (one hour, today only, until I turn it off, or for a custom duration) and select someone from my contacts to share with or grab a link to send in any other app. Pretty straightforward stuff.

I set up sharing from my phone to my husband’s account and vice-versa, and started testing it out when I went grocery shopping, when he went to work, and when we were both spending a day out in Evreux. We both carry Android phones and the results were as I expected from years of Google Maps location sharing. Our locations were frequently updated, never more than five minutes apart, and throughout several entire days. It works, hoorray!

Find My Device for people = Google Maps location sharing

When I set up our location shares, I immediately noticed that both (me to him and him to me) were mirrored over to Google Maps. They’re all part of the same “Google Location Sharing” umbrella. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I’m glad Google didn’t cook up a separate sharing setup here and instead integrated it all with Maps’ existing feature.

The screenshots above show that both apps display very similar info, though Find My Device has a cleaner, more modern Material You aesthetic. I can see my husband’s location, when it was last updated, and whether or not he can see my location, too. Find My Device also shows me how far he is from me.

Both apps hide more details until I tap on my husband’s name. That reveals his phone’s battery life, a button to get directions to join him, and one to stop sharing my location with him. (This is also where Maps shows the distance between us.) Plus, there’s an overflow ⋮ menu to force a location refresh, hide him from my map if I don’t want to see his location all the time, and block him from ever seeing my location again.

Once again, Find My Device’s interface is cleaner here, though both are as functional as each other. I appreciate the pop of color behind the Live icon in Find My Device, which helps me immediately spot if the location is current or outdated. Compared to the light grey Just now of Google Maps, it’s easier to understand.

… or not?

My issue with Find My Device’s implementation, though, stems from the lack of extra features that have been baked into Google Maps’ location sharing for ages.

One is the Notifications option. This allows me to create rules and get notified when my husband enters an area or leaves it, like when he reaches work or leaves work. We don’t use this for stalking purposes but for safety reasons. We live alone in a foreign country, so we’re each other’s only real support system in France. Me making sure he’s OK and him making sure I’m OK are essential features in our everyday lives.

I’m sure a lot of families use this as well for kids, so not having it in Find My Device is a bit of a letdown, especially since it exists in Maps. All Google had to do was port the interface elements to show it here. Apple’s Find My already offers these notifications, too, so I’m baffled that they’re not there in Google’s app.

Google Maps also lets me create a home screen shortcut to any person’s location tracking — something Find My Device doesn’t offer yet. There are no widgets whatsoever for Find My Device, not for devices, trackers, or people.

So, while people tracking works in general in Google’s new Find My Device app, it’s a bit disappointing because it lacks options that exist inside the same feature in Google Maps. For now, I see no reason to open Find My Device to check up on someone’s location; I’ll stick with Google Maps until those extra options make their way to Find My Device once it exits “beta” or until Google’s new app offers something unique that’s not available in Maps.