A Week After Telegram: WhatsApp Announces A New Live Location Share Feature

WhatsApp reveals a new feature to enable sharing your location in real-time with family or friends, the announcement comes a week after Telegram has already implemented the exact same feature. Call it aggressive competition or a mere coincidence, it took WhatsApp only one week after Telegram had already released the feature, to announce they (WhatsApp)

Updated Oct 20, 2017News
WhatsApp, Telegram: new live location feature

Call it aggressive competition or a mere coincidence, it took WhatsApp only one week after Telegram had already released the feature, to announce they (WhatsApp) will be making live location share feature available in the coming weeks.

Not surprisingly, both apps’ live location feature is astonishingly similar to the other, having the ability to share your location with either a person or a group, or set a timer for the sharing to expire, is how both companies describe live location.

However, the big difference between WhatsApp and Telegram is that while the former is still working its way to deploying live location, the latter, on the other hand, has already done so more than a week ago (October 10, Telegram V. 4.4).

Mind you that WhatsApp is far more popular than Telegram, a fact which could serve as an excuse for why it takes longer to implement, though being more popular and backed by Facebook seems to also be a good reason for why WhatsApp should be one step ahead of its competition.

To share your location live on WhatsApp, granted you have a version that supports the new feature, open a chat with the person or group you want to share with > under “Location” in the attach button, there’s a new option to “Share Live Location”. Choose for how long you want to share and tap send.

On Telegram: select ‘Location’ from the attachment menu and choose ‘Share My Location for…’.

Apart from live location, Telegram’s latest version also introduced a few more interesting features such as: a new in-app media player, a new translation platform to cater for more languages and a new ‘admin’ badge to mitigate important messages recognition, especially in large groups.

To read more about Telegram 4.4 new features check out their latest blog post here.