OnX Rolls Out Location Sharing

A while back, I talked about a relative newcomer to the off-road mapping app pantheon: No Roads. Their app is solidly baked around the idea of developing a community, with users being able to share trails, waypoints, & helpful tools to organize trail rides. Part of this was a location sharing feature, that allowed people in your group to see the location of everyone else in the group.

I had mentioned that this could be a really useful feature to get everyone shepherded to a rally point, and to know what everyone’s ETA looks like, for planning the day’s ride. However, I also thought that it could be annoying if sharing your location with another user on the app was a permanent thing, like with Share Location in the Apple iOS.

Well, lo and behold, OnX has been working on the same feature, and it appears they have struck the right balance between functionality and privacy.

With the new feature, users can share their location to a group of up to 10 others, and the location sharing drops once the group disbands. A group leader can either send out an invite to members to share their location, or a user can go to “Go and Track” in the bottom menu, and select “Share My Location”, which creates a link that they can share with up to 10 friends, via a messaging app. Once added, people show up as buddy icons on everyone’s map.

One caveat is that location sharing only works while a user has cell service. If their buddy icon is green, it means that you’re seeing their location updated in real-time. However, if it goes gray, then that means that they’ve wandered outide the reach of their cellular carrier, and you will only see their last known location.

No word yet as to whether this feature is going to work with satellite celular, such as the new T-Mobile Starlink service. I kind of doubt that it will, as the number of apps that services is fairly limited, at the moment. I’ll give it a test the next time I’m that far out in the boonies, though.