There’s a New Kind of Social Media App People Are Obsessed With. You’ve Probably Used It Already. – Slate

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My friend recently told me a story over drinks that I haven’t been able to get out of my head. Her two friends, let’s call them Alice and Bob, were something of a lynchpin couple in her friend group. They’d been dating for a few years and moved in together almost immediately. Everyone knew them as an item that did pretty much everything together. Alice and Bob were more like AliceandBob, really.

My friend had both Alice and Bob’s locations on Apple’s Find My app—one of the “Utilities” applications that comes pre-installed on Apple devices and lets a user see locations that have been shared with them. She’d watch them go about their days as blue dots that drove to work, picked up groceries, and came back home. Ah, cozy domestic bliss.

Then one night, my friend noticed that Alice and Bob simultaneously switched off their locations. Sacre bleu! Weeks later, each half of the couple individually admitted to her that they were taking a break. They wanted to give themselves time to get back together or separate for good before “going public” with a breakup.

I’d heard of other stories of the Find My app playing a big role in people’s social lives: A different couple did break up, then continued to share their locations with each other so they could avoid awkward run-ins in public. One friend was tracking the location of his girlfriend while she was traveling to another city, then saw that his old classmate happened to be in the same bar. So he introduced them to one another in a group chat, 100 miles away, and sent a screenshot of their neighboring locations. I use the Find My app, too. After years of only sharing my location with my grandmother, I moved from the continental U.S. to an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I’ve struggled to keep in touch with friends while navigating a physical divide and five-hour time difference. Seeing all of their locations as dots across North America makes me feel closer to them, especially at hours of their night that a “thinking about you” text would not be appreciated.

I’m not alone. Younger generations are spurning the social media sites of their parents, but what’s shocking is the alternative we’ve embraced: the Find My app that shares your real-time location with as many friends as you want. Find My is our newest social media app—and a damn good one at that.

I have 15 people’s locations. My cousin has 8. My sister has 21. And a co-worker has 30. A friend did an informal poll on his Instagram story after I mentioned that I was working on this story (thanks, Ari!). A few dozen people responded, ranging from 0 (gotta respect the Luddite game) to 30-plus. Around 10 seemed to be the average response.

A survey from the polling firm CivicScience of about 1,000 people earlier this year found that 4 in 10 U.S. adults shared their location with at least one other person. I could imagine that proportion would grow had the pollsters asked about the usage of certain apps that have subtly and not-so-subtly added location-sharing features: Strava, Snapchat, rideshare apps, and Instagram all incorporate users’ real-time locations.

It doesn’t surprise me that the normalization of location-sharing has led to its use as a kind of social media in and of itself. Yet even I was surprised by the ways in which Find My as social media has altered the fabric of our lives, both online and off.

Rishi, 22, is fresh out of college and checks the Find My app three or four times a day. “It’s almost as religiously as I open up Instagram,” he told me. He opens it up to see if his roommates are home and to check on friends’ ETAs when they say they’re on their way (and who among us hasn’t sent that text when we haven’t left our homes yet).

But the Find My app directly affected Rishi’s college social life. His friends used it when going to a party, because how else do you know how fashionably late to arrive? At least once, a friend of a friend asked if he could come through after seeing his friends’ locations at Rishi’s apartment.

The most ingenious or dystopian example of how his friends used Find My would have to be the college bar scene. “There were two bars at my school that people would go on Friday and Saturday, either Red Lion or KAMS,” he said. “They both were a similar vibe and they were maybe a four-minute walk between each other.”

Two bars, both alike in dignity, in fair Champaign, Illinois, where we lay our scene. On a weekend night, Rishi and his roommates would pool their phones, open up the Find My app, and see which bar had more of their friends. He compared the process to “curating your night.”

It’s no coincidence that this new form of social media is gaining popularity at the same time that traditional social media platforms have become enshittified. Big tech has lost the plot when it comes to creating products that truly connect people. Instead, the old guard of social media is determined to wring every advertising dollar out of a bevvy of dying platforms, and maximize engagement by attempting to counteract a drop in user-generated content with A.I. slop. There’s also the documented, widescale social experiments conducted on users by platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn.

If you’re under 50, no one you know posts on Facebook anymore; Instagram is for posting photo dumps and curating an aesthetic for your co-workers; and TikTok is for doomscrolling. I don’t use Snapchat because I’m not a tween. BeReal’s appeal ended the second the app started pushing users to friend randos and post more than once a day, defeating its entire raison d’être. I know Spotify just launched a chat feature, and I can’t imagine a world in which I will ever use it (if I want to share a juicy podcast about the Olivia Nuzzi drama with my friend, I’m going to text it to them like a normal person or link to it in my Slate article). I personally have a soft spot for Photo Roulette, an app that chooses random photos from your camera roll and turns them into a competition guessing game with friends, but that’s more of a special-occasion treat for those who have mastered the art of sequestration via Hidden Photos.

The common characteristics these apps share is that they’re gamified to the max, engineered to produce addictive responses in their users and hold our attention. In contrast, Find My is refreshingly bare-bones. There are no ads, paywalls, dark patterns, or bells and whistles at all. The only two “customizable” features are your name and the small circular icon that shows your location. Social media has become increasingly artificial; there is so much artifice in our own profiles and the sites themselves. But there’s nothing more tangible than a platform that answers the question “Where are you right now?”

When location-sharing data moves into a sphere where it’s considered bad social etiquette to receive a location without sharing one back, I start to worry about the deeper ramifications of this technology. I think back to my friend’s story about the couple who secretly broke up. Location-sharing apps mean we have incredibly personal information about one another at our fingertips. For better and for worse, it makes keeping secrets a challenge. When we know we’re being tracked—when we feel invisible eyes on the backs of our necks at all times—we become a whole lot less interesting. And where is the line between a secret and basic privacy? Worse, I’ve heard of overeager contacts being a bit too up-to-date on an acquaintance’s location. Imagine a stalker lurking among one’s 30-plus “location mutuals,” or a stolen or confiscated phone leaving others vulnerable to bad actors.

Rejection and isolation translate to the plane of location sharing, albeit in different ways. One writer recalled watching in real time as her college roommates got dinner without her. Another friend tells me he looks up his friends’ locations when he feels lonely and often sees them at home. He imagines they might be lonely, too. The thought doesn’t console him.

We all seek human contact. Intimacy. Location sharing reveals just how close to one another—and how far apart—we are.