How to quickly share your location with iPhone

With the update to iOS 13, the Cupertino-based company introduced new ways to share location with other users. Here's how to do it quickly

Starting with iOS 13, Apple has unified the "Find My iPhone" and "Find My Friends" functions into a single app called "Where's", through which you can share your location with other devices running iPadOS and macOS Catalina. The app is convenient and effective, but it's not the only way to let others find you via the iPhone.

You can also send your location via the Messages app, which also allows you to continuously share your location (a kind of real-time tracking). Finally, you can also use a trick to share your location via iPhone that involves using some sort of magic word, to be sent via Messages or via SMS. All of these methods have in common that the location shared is the one detected by the GPS, so you first need to enable location services by going to Settings > Privacy > Localization and making sure that the apps you want to use to tell others our location have access to these services.

How to share your location with Where's

The first thing to do to share your location via Where's is to go to Settings > Your name > Where's and enable "Share my location". At this point we can open the app and select the People panel and then Share my location or Start location sharing. At this point we'll have to enter the name or phone number of the person with whom we're sharing our location and choose how long to share it.

How to share location with Messages

The second method to share location on iPhone is to use the Messages app. After opening the app, we enter the conversation with the contact we want to send the location to and tap their name at the top. Then we tap the "i" and choose "Send my current location", choosing whether to do it for an hour, until the end of the day or forever.

How to share location with Messages quickly

If on our iPhone we use the QuickType keyboard we can get the same result just described even faster. But this only works if we have set the predictive keyboard and English as the typing language. At this point we have to type "I'm at" and the "Current Location" suggestion will appear. Just tap it to share our location immediately.