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Apple finally updates Find My Friends for iOS 7

Apple has finally updated one of the last of its apps holding out for iOS 7: Find My Friends.

The social app stood out the most on iOS 7 with its leather stitching and real life paper map theme, but rest assured Apple has redesigned it with iOS 7 in mind.

The new update features transparency, lots of white space, and feels much lighter (which is refreshing if that’s your style). It also abandons the tab bar UI for a single view with sub menus.Of course the app still allows users to share your location, permanently or temporarily, with other iOS users.

The update joins iBooks and iTunes U, which were updated last week, rounding out the list of Apple apps in need of an iOS 7 update aside from iTunes Connect Mobile, Keynote Remote, and iAd Gallery (and maybe Logic Remote).

Find My Friends 3 is available for free on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

(Thanks Greg!)

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Comments

  1. Finally! Oh yeah:)

  2. John Moss - 10 years ago

    A HUGE improvement.

  3. Alexander Voigt - 10 years ago

    You can now share geofence notifications with others. This is new, right?

    • weakguy - 10 years ago

      Yes, I believe so. It didn’t notice this feature before.

      • weakguy - 10 years ago

        *I didn’t. Damn, when can we edit our comments again? I still dont like this comment system.

      • rahhbriley - 10 years ago

        +1 for hating the new comments still. One reason being the lack of ability to edit comments.

  4. There are three more apps to be updated: Keynote Remote, iTunes Connect Mobile and Logic Remote.

  5. danbridgland - 10 years ago

    New over zealous copyright notice.

    “Copyright © 2012-2103 Apple Inc. All rights reserved. Apple and the Apple logo are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the US and other countries.”

    http://gspa21.ls.apple.com/html/attribution.html

  6. jonnikuest (@jonnikuest) - 10 years ago

    Hoping this new update actually notifies me when my “friend” aka my wife leaves the geofence aka work. It used to work under iOS 6 but it hasn’t been ever since i’ve been running 7.

    :)

    • Chuck Dick - 10 years ago

      Same here. I always thought it was some setting I forgot to check/uncheck somewhere in my iCloud universe. Hopefully it’s a bug that has been fixed.

  7. Mr. Grey (@mister_grey) - 10 years ago

    Buggy and kind of clunky for me. It crapped out when I installed it and put itself inside a tree of infinitely regressing folders (not sure WTF was going on there). I had to do a reset of the phone to make it show up again and when it did, it resurrected a long long list of every iPhone and iPad I’ve ever owned or used in it (these devices have all been explicitly deleted by myself from all my other online records at Apple), that cannot be edited or changed.

    Apple really is a sloppy, sloppy company nowadays. it’s like they aren’t even trying anymore.

    • Yes (@AMillah) - 10 years ago

      Ummm, the long list of your previous devices has always been there, you probably just never paid much attention. Restoring your devices and signing out of your apple ID has never removed these devices from showing up in your list of devices in both Find My Friends and Find My iPhone. You can’t actually track them, but they still show up in your list of devices under their previous names. YOU have to manually remove them from your list of devices. Its a tad of a hindrance, but this isn’t something that magically showed up today, its been there since the start.

      If you would have done a simple swipe gesture across one of these devices in your “long list,” you would have probably noticed that you could delete them. Its been like that since the very beginning of this service.

      • Mr. Grey (@mister_grey) - 10 years ago

        Actually not. You can explicitly remove items from the list of devices Apple stores in their records. I have done this. They no longer show up in iTunes or any apps including “find my Friends.”

        However *this* version of find my friends has resurrected this long deleted list. Which kind of removes my faith in the ability to delete the items in the first place since many of these devices I expressly deleted and disentangled from my records years ago, yet somehow Apple not only kept that information, it mistakenly slipped it into this new app.

  8. Tom Rudderham - 10 years ago

    There are a few more comparison images here:
    http://iosguides.net/find-friends-app-updated-interface-ios-7/

    Needless to say this is a much welcome improvement!

  9. Jacques Fromage - 10 years ago

    I’m glad to see the stitching gone, but am I the only one that thinks that the graphics in this (and most of the other redesigned Apple apps and icons) is washed-out, pale, hard to read and just plain not very engaging anymore?? Apple graphics used to be highly-detailed and even fun, but that all seems to have been thrown out. And I think functionality is getting worse, too. In this app, it now displays an email address instead of name (at least it does for me; in the screenshots above it looks like it still displays the name), and the calendar is so bad, I had to buy a replacement (Fantastical). It’s really quite depressing.

    • Dominique Peretti - 10 years ago

      No you’re not. But don’t expect 9to5mac or CultOfMac to relay critical voices.
      Go to the AppStore and read what real world users think about iBooks redesign.
      We are a great number of angry, depressed users.
      It took a single iteration of iOS for Ive to destroy what made the success of the iPhone : detailed, contrasted graphics. Subtle shadows, depth. Pixel precise postioning, etc…

    • Greg Wostrel - 10 years ago

      I absolutely agree with you Jacques and Dominique. I had to go into settings and enable the increased font size, increased contrast, and bold font settings. Helped a fair amount to make it all just more readable.

  10. Eric Mason (@eMason0321) - 10 years ago

    It would be nice if you could locate more than 1 person using the same iCloud account, but different emails. My folks both have iPhones and have them synced to the same account. I can only locate one or the other. The only way to locate both of them is to use Find my iPhone and know what their password is.

    • shm1ck83 - 10 years ago

      You can have two iPhones on the same iTunes account but for iCloud it is recommended to be different. If you use the same iCloud account for two iPhones iMessage will not work correctly as both parties will see each other’s messages

  11. comp1400 - 10 years ago

    Adds Siri support…

  12. William - 10 years ago

    Reblogged this on William's iBlog and commented:
    Well, better late than never.

  13. Monty de Vere - 10 years ago

    What is the point of this app? Most of my friends are on Android. Unless is cross-platform no point using it.

    • raphaelwp - 10 years ago

      There is a solution to that. It’s called facebook. Login and unfriend all the people who have android and then all your will have iPhone. Joking apart, it’s more useful for family.

  14. crateish (@crateish) - 10 years ago

    Ok, I’m a big, big Apple user. So are most of my co-workers and many of my friends. I have never encountered anyone (outside of tech bloggers/commenters) who ever use this app.

    • raphaelwp - 10 years ago

      Dunno. My wife and I use it the whole time. I have friends that use it to keep track of their friends and I often use it for meetings when I come in from out of town.

  15. jerjuan (@jerjuan) - 10 years ago

    Now this is a flat design that makes sense!!! Context is still achieved and improved without leather and stitching that added nothing. Great Job!

    • jerjuan (@jerjuan) - 10 years ago

      The addition of using pictures from contacts in the map area is also a much needed IMPROVEMENT! Probably the change I like the most!

      • raphaelwp - 10 years ago

        Hmm. But for some reason my photo of “me” doesn’t appear. Anyone know how to fix it?

      • Christian Hoffmann - 10 years ago

        @raphaelwp:
        You have to make sure the email address you login to Find my Friends with exactly matches the email address you have set for yourself in the contacts app (even case-sensitive).

  16. bleed6colours - 10 years ago

    I’ve never been able to figure out how to use this app. But it looks a whole lot easier and more straight forward to use now :)

Author

Avatar for Zac Hall Zac Hall

Zac covers Apple news, hosts the 9to5Mac Happy Hour podcast, and created SpaceExplored.com.