Google might revamp its real-time location sharing hub on Android soon

Spotted by tipster AssembleDebug and shared with PiunikaWeb, a new update to Google’s real-time location sharing hub on Android seems to be in the works. The new page, enabled manually through an activity inside Google Play Service, suggests that users will soon be able to view and manage all their active location shares in Google services from a single, dedicated page within the Settings menu.

The tipster managed to uncover the new “Google Location Sharing” page with Google Play Services (GMS) beta version 24.15.14.

Here are a couple of screenshots for reference:

Further digging in the Google Play Services revealed a list of apps that are whitelisted to make use of the feature. The flag given below contains a list of apps encoded in base64, which when decoded, reveals the package name of some apps.

PeriodicLocationReportingFeature__centralized_lsr_api_caller_allowlist

Here’s the list of apps:

• com.google.android.apps.safetyhub
• com.google.android.apps.adm
• com.google.android.apps.maps
• com.google.android.apps.gmm
• com.google.android.apps.gmm.fishfood
• com.google.android.apps.gmm.dev

This page appears to consolidate all of a user’s active location shares into one place, regardless of which Google app initiated the share. This would allow users to easily see who they’re sharing their location with, how long the share has been active for, and presumably, provide a way to quickly revoke those shares.

At present, if you go to Settings > Location > Location Services > Google Location Sharing, you’ll be taken to the web page where you can manage the real-time location sharing with anyone on Google. So this new dedicated page would likely replace the web page and instead offer a dedicated hub instead.

If you’re a frequent user of location sharing features on Android, this update is something you should look forward to. It will make it much easier to keep track of who has access to your location and to revoke those permissions when they’re no longer needed.

Of course, some functionings of the new page are still a mystery, but I’m sure we’ll get more hints over the coming weeks. So stay tuned to PiunikaWeb for more details.