Google is discontinuing their Trusted Contacts location-tracking service

If you have been relying on Google’s Trusted Contact service to track friends and family we have some bad news for you.

Google Trusted contacts lets you send a location tracking invites to contacts, who could agree (or not) to a time-limited or permanent consent for you to track their location, their movement history and battery level.

Google is discontinuing the service, which launched in 2016, on the 1st December 2020, with the company saying:

“The Trusted Contacts app will be removed from the App Store and Play Store today, and will stop being supported after December 1, 2020,” Google said. “If the app is installed on your device, you can continue to use it until then.”

The reason for the move is that much of the functionality has been integrated into Google Maps directly, including via Google Maps Live View with Location Sharing, which makes it easy to see where someone is, including distance, in relation to you.

Current users of the app have until the 1st of December to download their data, before the service joins Google’s ever-expanding graveyard.

via XDA-Dev