Share Your Location With Friends, Temporarily

Saturday, a street market, and you have said "we're near the coffee place" three times to three different people who are all somewhere in the same four hundred metres. One of them is going in circles. Someone eventually shares their location, everyone finds each other, and forty minutes later you're on a train home with a permanent line into your whereabouts still quietly running in someone's app.

You wanted to be findable for an hour. What you got was a switch you have to remember to turn off, and which you will not remember to turn off.

That's the whole problem in one sentence. Being findable is nearly always a situation — a market, a festival, a friend arriving at a station you know better than they do. Situations end. The tools mostly don't.

The honest position, up front

Blinko doesn't do continuous location sharing. There's no live trail of you, no map of where your friends are right now, no dot that keeps moving after you've stopped thinking about it.

That's not an oversight we're dressing up. The app has no background location mode at all — nothing that can read your position while it's closed or in your pocket, because the capability was never built in. Every location read in Blinko happens because you just tapped something, in the foreground, once.

Which means the honest framing of what it does is: you share a moment, not a movement history. Two moments, actually, and they work differently.

Moment one: a pin you publish, and re-pin yourself

If you want people to be able to find you today, you publish a Beacon.

A Beacon pins where you were at the instant you published it. That's a snapshot. It does not follow you across the market, because nothing is following you across the market.

When you move — you've given up on the coffee place and you're by the record stalls now — you re-pin. It's one tap, one button, and the pin updates to where you're stood.

Your followers see how fresh that is, in plain words: Live · updated 12 min ago. Not a dot they're meant to trust implicitly, but a timestamp and a judgement. If it says twenty minutes, they know to text you. And if you wander off and forget about it entirely, it doesn't quietly keep lying on your behalf — after a few hours it stops calling itself live and starts saying when you were last seen there. A Beacon also carries an end time, and when that passes it's simply over.

There's a version of this feature that would have been much easier to build and much easier to market: turn it on, stream position, call it live. The reason it isn't that is that a stream keeps broadcasting long after the reason for it has gone, and the person it's broadcasting about is the one least likely to be thinking about it. A pin you have to re-tap can go stale. A stream can't — which sounds better right up until you notice that "never stale" and "never stops" are the same property.

Moment two: a check-in that keeps no coordinates

The second one is even smaller, and it's the one that will surprise you.

When you've got a Plan with people — a table booked, a meeting point, a start time — you check in when you arrive. One tap on the card.

Your phone works out that you're actually there, and then it throws the answer away. The plan records that you arrived and when. Your coordinates and your GPS accuracy exist for a moment to answer a single yes-or-no question, and they are not written to the plan, not written to the event, not kept in the logs. What survives is a name and a time: you're here.

That's a genuinely different shape of data. There's no location to leak later because there is no location — the app confirmed a fact and kept the fact rather than the evidence.

Your friends get exactly the thing they wanted, which was never your coordinates. It was has she got there yet.

What a stranger sees

The last piece is what happens when someone who isn't following you comes across a Beacon while browsing the map.

They see an approximate area — roughly a kilometre across — rather than a pin on a doorstep. No street address, no place identifier, nothing precise enough to walk to. Enough to know something is happening in the neighbourhood, which is the point of a map, and not enough to know which building, which is nobody's business.

Being specific about that matters, because a claim like this is easy to make loosely and easy to over-read. The coarsening is on the public map. If you send someone the link to your Beacon, the link works — that's what a link is for, and possession of it is the access control. Deciding who gets it is your decision, made once, deliberately. That's the same shape as everything else here: inviting people without handing anything to a platform is a choice you make per person, not a permission you grant permanently and forget.

Why the distinction is worth caring about

There's a comfortable argument that says none of this matters much, since you'd only ever share with people you trust.

It doesn't hold, for two reasons. The first is that permanent sharing outlives the trust it was granted under — friendships change, relationships end, phones get handed to children and repair shops, and the setting you turned on in 2023 is still on. The second is subtler: knowing you're findable changes what you do. People take a different route home. Teenagers find the fifteen minutes the app can't see. Something that runs on its own never has to ask you anything, which is exactly why it ends up knowing more than you agreed to; something you send is a decision you made, at a moment you chose.

A family that wants to stop wondering whether the train got in doesn't need a map, either. It needs one sentence at the right moment, which is what a check-in looks like inside a family.

So: temporarily, meaning what?

Meaning you publish a pin because there's a reason to, re-tap it when you move, and let it end when the afternoon does.

Meaning you check in at the restaurant and what's kept is that you arrived, not where you were standing.

Meaning that when you're on the train home, there's nothing still running. Not because you remembered to turn it off. Because there was never anything to turn off.

Blinko is free on iOS and Android, on a free forever plan — every feature, no ads, and no data sold.

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