Sending a friend where you are is one of the most useful things a chat can do. It is also one of the most sensitive pieces of information we give away. That’s why we built location in PockyAPP so that only you decide about it.
Three levels of precision
When you tap attachments → Location in a chat, you choose how precisely the place is sent. You can send the exact spot, for example when you are looking for each other in a crowd at a concert. You can send only the surroundings within about 500 metres, a neighbourhood or street rather than a particular house. Or you can show just the city, with a precision of about 5 kilometres.
What’s interesting is how approximate location is calculated. The coordinates are rounded on your phone: the app divides the map into squares and sends only the centre of the one you are in. Your real position never leaves your device. Because nearby places fall into the same square, the real position can’t be worked out even from several messages in a row. On the map you see exactly the circle the other side will see.
You set the default precision in the guide after sign-in or any time in settings, and you can change it for every message.
A map bubble and navigation
A sent location shows up in the chat as a bubble with a small map. Tapping it opens it full screen and the Navigate button hands the coordinates to the app of your choice: Mapy.cz, Google Maps, Waze or another. Nothing is sent to anyone else until that tap.
Live location
On the way to a meetup or home, live location comes in handy. You pick 15 minutes, an hour or 8 hours and the phone then sends your position continuously to the chosen chat. In a car every five seconds, on foot every ten. When you stand still it sends nothing needlessly and only lets people know every few minutes that sharing is on. With approximate location a new value is sent only when you move into a different square.
Sharing continues even with the app closed, until you end it or it expires. You always know about it: the status bar shows a “You are sharing live location” notification with an End button, and the same bar is in the chat. On Samsung the app offers to turn off battery saving so the phone doesn’t put it to sleep in the background.
The Map tab
The bottom bar has a Map tab. It shows who is sharing live location with you right now: a photo at the place where they are and a card with the name, the age of the location and the time until which they share. Tapping moves the map to that person and the Write button opens the chat. On a tablet the list of people sits to the right of the map.
Maps from our own server
The maps in PockyAPP aren’t from Google or any other big company. They run on our own map server maps.pokecio.com from open OpenStreetMap data. We tuned the look to the app’s colours. They cover Czechia and Slovakia for now and neighbouring countries are marked “Coming soon” on the map.
What the server sees
Coordinates in encrypted chats are encrypted just like messages.
For live location the server also sees that you are sharing and until when, because the Matrix protocol sends that information unencrypted. It doesn’t see where you are. That’s why we don’t add any caption to the sharing announcement.