Overview
Are you preparing for an epic battle to secure your school from being taken over by a dark lord, and do you need to coordinate this battle with your mates? Are you going to a festival, and want to know where your friends hang out and where the clean toilets are? Or are you taking your family to an amusement park, and want to set a meeting point for lunch? Then Mates Map is your solution.
Mates Map allows you to visit an event with a group of people, without the constant fear of losing each other in the crowd. With Mates Map you can keep track of the location of everybody in your group, set Points of Interest that are instantaneously visible to the group, and use chat to coordinate your plans.
Mates Map will be available for both Apple and Android phones and tablets mid-2017.
Mates Map is simple
Mates Map has been designed with simplicity in mind: Agree on a group name with your mates. Enter your name and this group name in Mates Map and activate it. You can now track the position of all group members on a map or on a compass, place Point of Interest markers, navigate to a mate or POI, and instantly chat with everybody in the group. And when your event is over, you simply deactivate Mates Map with one press of a button.
Mates Map offers different ways of locating your mates. You can view all your mates on an interactive map which offers Map, Satellite and Hybrid views. But you can also display a compass rose with arrows that point to all your Mates. And if you're looking for a specific mate, simply use the navigation screen which features both the map and a compass view. Just rotate your phone until the arrow points directly ahead and start walking.
Points of Interest can be added by a long press gesture on the map or by marking your current location as POI. You then set a name for this POI and it will be visible instantaneously to all your mates. Viewing and navigating to POIs is similar to viewing and navigating to Mates. And if a POI is not needed anymore, anybody in the group can simply delete it.
Chat is automatically enabled for the group. There is no need to setup a separate group in a dedicated Instant Messaging application. Everybody who joins a group can read all chats from the past. (Note that chats will be deleted automatically and permanently after 24 hours.)
Mates Map gives you full control
Mates Map can be configured with different update frequencies, to give you full control over battery and network usage. A high update frequency (as frequent as every 10 seconds is possible) will perform updates often, but will cost more network bandwidth and battery consumption. This is an ideal setting for situations where your friends move about quickly, and accurate tracking is important. But for situations where people don't move about all that much, and accuracy is less important, you can also select lower update frequencies - perhaps even as low as 30 minutes. This greatly reduces network bandwidth usage and battery consumption.
While Mates Map is running in the background, it will continue to send out position updates. It will also alert you to any new, incoming chats in the group using your phones Notification mechanism. You can configure this in your phone settings.
Mates Map respects your privacy
Unlike other "Find My Friends"-type apps, Mates Map does not require you to setup a permanent user account, or to "invite" your friends to share their position with you. There is no link to Apple, Google, Facebook or any external ID provider. No passwords are required: All you need to do to maintain your privacy is to pick a unique and hard-to-guess group name. You decide whether, and how often, your position is shared with your mates. Your position is only shared with the mates in your group, not with anybody else. Similarly, POIs and chats are limited to your group as well. And when you deactivate Mates Map, all your personal and positional information will be deleted immediately.
If you want to hide yourself from the group for a while, you can disable the sharing of your position while remaining member of the group. Likewise, you can also hide your battery status from your friends if you want to.
Upgrade to Mates Map Unlimited
Mates Map Free allows you to view up to five Mates and five Points of Interest. An in-app purchase allows you to upgrade to Mates Map Unlimited, which allows an unlimited number of Mates and POIs to be visible. Chats are always unlimited, regardless of the version of the app you're using.
Two types of upgrades are available. An individual subscription upgrades a single device to Mates Map Unlimited, for an extended period of time (one month or one year). A group subscription is only valid for one or three days, but is shared with all group members: As soon as one group member purchases a group subscription, all group members will be able to view unlimited Mates and POIs.