What we learned building a location-sharing mobile app

Locate Me is a small app with one job: share your location with people you trust, reliably, without draining the battery or leaking that data anywhere it shouldn't go.

Battery life is a privacy feature too

Aggressive background location polling is the easiest way to build a location app and the fastest way to get uninstalled. We tuned update frequency based on movement — polling more often when the device is actually moving, backing off when it's stationary — which cut battery drain significantly without making the shared location noticeably stale.

Sharing is explicit, not ambient

Location is only shared with people the user has explicitly added, for as long as they've chosen to share it. There's no "friends of friends" visibility and no default-on sharing after signup — every share is a deliberate action with a clear way to stop it.

Small apps still need real infrastructure discipline

It's tempting to treat a simple app as not needing the same rigor as a bigger system. We built Locate Me with the same encryption-in-transit and least-privilege access patterns we use everywhere else, because "it's just a small app" isn't a reason to be careless with someone's real-time location.