Google’s announcement last week of location sharing in Google Maps is having a very real world effect for Google+ users who are now being advised that ‘Locations’ is being disabled.
Previously users in Google+ were able to share their real-time location across Google products with people and circles they wanted to. That function is now being taken over by Google Maps, or will be with Google advising in their announcement last week that the rollout of location sharing would head worldwide ‘soon’.
If you go into Google+ now and select the Locations option in the nav drawer, you’ll now be presented with this screen:
Google is also promoting the change to Maps for location sharing on their support page which now says:
You can’t share your location in Google+ anymore. If you used to share your location in Google+ and want to keep sharing it, you’ll need to share it again in Google Maps.
As far as we can tell, the location sharing feature isn’t live in Google Maps as yet, but if this is happening then it can’t be too far away. If you get location sharing in Google Maps, let us know.
No wonder it hasn’t been performing well lately. One of me and my wife’s favourite was the G+’s location widget. We’re gonna miss it.
I just received it on my Redmi Note 3 on custom rom 7.1.1 and on my Pixel too after a restart.
I remember when location sharing was called Latitude and was part of Google Maps. Then they ripped it out and put it in Google+.
I’m guessing they’ll dumb it down to remove any useful features they used to have.
I’ve lost the link in Google+, but there’s no new version of Maps available yet.
I received the new locations feature in Google Maps today after Locations was removed from Google+. I’ve been able to add people to share “ongoing” however my friends and family haven’t received the transition yet so I am currently unable to comment on the performance and features. It all seems simple enough so far. I have a S7edge and Tab8.4.
This has rolled out to both my wife and I. We’ll be testing it today. Both of us have uninstalled Google+ as this was the only feature we used it for.