Trusted Contacts is joining the Google graveyard

If you rely on Trusted Contacts to keep track of friends and family, we have some bad news: Google on Friday announced the app is joining the company’s graveyard. It’s another service in a long list of services that have gone way too soon.

Announced at the end of 2016, Trusted Contacts was a location sharing app that let family and friends know you were safe. You could request someone’s location, and that person could approve or deny your request. You could also see a person’s recent activity and device battery status.

Trusted Contacts later added features like customized timeouts and permanent location sharing following a request. The app also eventually allowed users to see where someone was directly in Maps — and therein lies the rub. In the last several months, Google Maps has since added real-time Location Sharing, essentially making Trusted Contacts moot.

“As a result, the Trusted Contacts app will be removed from the App Store and Play Store today, and will stop being supported after December 1, 2020,” Google said. “If the app is installed on your device, you can continue to use it until then.”

Users will be able to download their trusted contacts until December 1. After that, they will be unable to see the live location you are sharing with them from the app.

If you want to continue sharing your location with friends and family, you can do so in Google Maps. Even better, you can now utilize Live View with Location Sharing, making it easy to see where someone is, including distance, in relation to you.

There’s a running joke about Google killing off services not long after they’re announced. The demise of Trusted Contacts joins a long list of apps and services Google has killed off, including my personal favorite Google Allo.

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