The Most Useful App Is Find My Friends
Updated at 11:00 a.m. ET on November 20, 2019.
You simply can’t get around New York City without GPS. I know this is not actually true, because generations of people did it, but it is true for me: I bought my first smartphone in 2014, my first summer in the city, solely for Google Maps. And a year ago, I persuaded my friends to share their locations with me “indefinitely” in Apple’s Find My Friends app.
It’s not that I fear for my friends’ safety in any real way. (We’ve all been to college, which is statistically more dangerous for a woman than anything we’re doing now.) That isn’t why I asked them to give me access to their location at all hours of the day and night, forever. What I wanted most was the sense of shared plot, by way of literal plotting.
The idea was that I could wake up and watch them. When we made dinner plans, I could exactly as they rounded the corner to the restaurant. Sitting on my stoop, waiting for one of them to bring over a bottle of wine, I could her little blue bubble All my people, scattered around the city, doing their things, living their lives, then returning to places where I knew they were okay. “Where the fuck am I?” my friend Katie texted the group chat one day at 3 a.m., alongside a photo of dozens of pairs of high-end sneakers, arranged in neat rows on the floor of a strange apartment. A rhetorical question, because of course exactly where she was.
