Track Family and Friends in Real Time with MapmyIndia ‘Locate’

Personal safety is a topmost priority these days and while many independent developers have released apps to ensure this, it is now the time of MapmyIndia, one of the leaders in digital maps in India turn to release a people tracking app for mobile phones – MapmyIndia Locate.

The app helps users identify the location of a person and helps friends and family to stay connected.
The Android app is available on Google Play while non-Android users need to visit http://locate.mapmyindia.com to track users.
While not unique, it is good to see this service from a trusted name. With MapmyIndia Locate, a user can add up-to three friends or family members to locate. The app tracks your location by default and automatically picks up the location every 500 meters and shows it as auto-check in but users can choose to allow others to see only manually checked-in locations.

MapmyIndia Locate Android app

MapmyIndia Locate supports detailed movement reporting and people can see the location on the map in real-time.
It also supports push notifications, something we think is an absolutely necessary feature.

There is also an option to customize the settings so one can set when others can see your location and you can set in based on days or by time.

The location reports are accessible not just in the app but also through a web/mobile web dashboard at http://locate.mapmyindia.com. This is something unique to this app that we have not seen with others. In fact, a great use case for the app is implementation across mobile salesforce team for corporates.
The app uses GPS, Wi-Fi or Cell Tower Triangulation (whichever is available) to compute location and is pretty precise in locating a person. While using GPS and WiFi will get a more precise location this will impact battery life greatly since location services do consume a lot of power. With battery life being an issue with most smartphones and Android in particular, we think it would be better for the app to report location at a greater time interval than every 500 meters.
While one use of the app is to locate friends and family the app could also be used to locate a lost mobile phone. In fact the simplest way to do this is to use Google Maps and enable Latitude to find the phone in case you misplace or lose it.
MapmyIndia provides various mapping products across all mobile, Internet, In-car, print etc. It’s flagship product is ‘MapmyIndia Navigator’  - an in-car GPS navigation device.
At the end of April, MapmyIndia had launched a new version of its maps which added Union territories and various other features and had also announced that the service now covers 10.33 million places, 1.9 million road kilometers, 600,000 villages, 4,787 cities at street level, 50 cities at house level and 46 cities in full 3D.