Google Maps is one of the mainstays of Google’s stable of apps and services and certainly one of the best performing and most updated. Today they are rolling out an enhancement to their location/trip/’journey sharing’ feature that makes sharing each trip quick and easy right from the navigation interface.
After starting a trip just click on the ^ in the lower right corner to bring up the driving menu, from there click on the new ‘Share trip progress’ option and you can than share with any of your favourite contacts via Google Maps, or send out a link to any platform you like.
For those at the receiving end follow the link and you’ll get see the current progress of the trip including destination, eta, location (obviously) and a few other details. Once the trip finishes the sharing session is automatically finished so you don’t need to worry about letting someone track you after the trip is finished.
Journey sharing is rolling out for driving, walking, and cycling navigation on Android and iOS for those of you in ‘mixed’ households. If you don’t have the update there’s no use spamming the Google Play Store, this looks like a server-side switch.
I’ve enabled location sharing (not trip sharing) with my family, but I’ve found the location polling to be very slow, whereas apps like uber show the location of the driver quote accurately and their location updates quite fast. I don’t know if trip sharing works in this faster way but if standard location sharing is anything to go by it would be quite hopeless.
For driving I like to see speed limit and have speed limit warning. It is the main reason I do not use it for driving very often. Wish these features would be added.
Have a look at Speedometer (Pro) in the Play Store. It may be what you want.
TomTom Speed/Camera app is quite good too and it can overlay on-top of android so works well with apps like Uber driver etc…