A location app shows a dot. The dot looks like “here, now”, but it is always a position the phone sent at some moment in the past. Sometimes that moment was 5 seconds ago. Sometimes it was 2 hours ago, because the phone was in a tunnel, out of battery, or simply resting on a table.
If the map does not tell you which, you guess. So in Silbame every position carries its age.
What you see
Next to each person in the list there is a short label:
- Live · now while you follow someone Live. The phone sends a new position every 5 seconds.
- 4 min ago, 38 min ago when the last position is a few minutes old. This is normal: outside Live the phone reports less often, to save battery.
- 2 h ago or older when the phone has not reported for a while. The dot stays where it was last seen, and the label says how old it is.
The same label is on the map and on the person’s page.
Why not just hide old positions
Because an old position is still useful. If a rider’s phone loses signal in a valley, the last position and its age tell the support car where to start looking. Hiding it would remove the one thing you know.
What matters is that nobody reads a 40-minute-old dot as “now”. The age label does that job.
Why the phone does not report every second
Positions cost battery. Live sends one about every 5 seconds, so it runs only while someone has your card open, up to 30 minutes at a time. Outside Live, the phone sends a position when it moves and rests when it does not. We measured what that costs on a real phone in a field test, and will publish the numbers and the method in a report on this site.
Sharing has an end time too
The age tells you how fresh a position is. The end time tells you how long someone shares at all: for one hour, until the end of the day, or until they stop it. When sharing ends, their dot stops updating, and you can see that it stopped.