I don't personally care about Latitude, but it does seem recently that Google have been on a crusade to ruin Google Maps on mobile devices. The two most noteworthy instances: (1) screwing up the offline-maps feature (<a href="http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/Ck_Pd6UgZCU" rel="nofollow">http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/Ck_Pd6UgZ...</a> -- but they've slightly walked this back: see <a href="https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/3246076" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/3246076</a>) and (2) adding advertisements to the Android version of Maps: <a href="http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/attract-new-customers-with-local-ads-on.html" rel="nofollow">http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/attract-new-customers-...</a> (I don't mind this at all on the web version of Maps, where I'm usually on a display with plenty of pixels, but on a mobile device that's a whole lot of space being taken up by advertisements instead of actually useful information).
Google's push towards Google+ reminds me of Microsoft's arrogance in forcing their vision of Windows 8. An established company trying to get another piece of the pie that is not their core competency. It's too bad Google is trying to get into the social game. I wish they would stick to the "serious" endeavors that started out with, more Wolfram Alpha, less Facebook. They don't have to own the entire internet, just do things that they can do better than anyone else...
Location history, however is here: <a href="https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0" rel="nofollow">https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0</a><p>I'm glad they kept that, I find it quite handy for several things, including as a cross check on how much time I spend at $client.
Sigh. Latitude put Loopt out of business. Now we don't have Loopt and we don't have Latitude.<p>Sharing location on G+ is not the same use case at all.
I don't understand why Google kills and replaces things seemingly with no thought of migration paths. Anyone know more about what goes on internally that causes companies to just throw up their hands in defeat on a product, forcing users to just start over? Is it really that hard to shim the Latitude APIs over the new service?
Latitudes manager seems happy with the decision: <a href="https://plus.google.com/+jlapenna/posts/deBP7kj7rMi" rel="nofollow">https://plus.google.com/+jlapenna/posts/deBP7kj7rMi</a><p>Also he offers plenty of behind the scenes reasoning in replies to the thread, such as this:<p>"We felt that we'd be able to get quicker feature parity and better newer features by cutting over now than waiting."
This was handy, I'll miss it. Luckily my SO is an iPhone user so I still have her on Find My Friends...<p>As the Google wind-down goes on, I've lost all trust in them to keep any of their services running. I won't invest any more time into a new Google service anymore. The only question right now is Google Apps email. I like their Gmail iOS app, but I might switch to another ActiveSync provider (for iOS push support).
The incredibly frustrating thing about this is that they have continued offering location services as part of Google+, but they've retired a service that works on iOS for one that does not. This strikes me as an incredibly user-hostile action.
There was a real use case for latitude, but I don't feel like they pulled it off right. I live in MA, and my brother lives in WI. We decided to meet each other in NY once while he was with friends. We used latitude as a way to communicate our location as we tried to find each other. It worked a lot better than saying "meet me at the shake shack" since neither of us knew the area.<p>The problem with it though was it was slow, thus typically outdated. So 90% of the time the information was simply not useful.
Hi there,
I wanted to let you know the Android / Web application we made with a friend, it is called lclz.in (<a href="http://lclz.in" rel="nofollow">http://lclz.in</a>). We created it because the end of Google Latitude and the lack for such app.<p>Lets explain it with a real use case, I want to meet my friend at an open air music festival with a lot of attendees. The classic way of doing it is calling him, but with the heavy music we will barely understand each other, plus it will be difficult to describe where we are to meet.<p>That's where the application will help : you select the contact you want to meet, it sends a SMS (or use the share dialog) requesting its location. The text contains a link to a site allowing any decent smartphone (even iOS/Blackberry/Windows Phone) to geolocalize him. Once done, you will get a notification on your phone displaying him on a map !<p>That's the beginning of the app, we've got a full backlog of ideas for the upcoming releases.
Meanwhile, feel free to install, use, and tell what you would have loved to see in it.