Google messages copies whatsapp’s live-location trick—too late

Google Messages will finally let you ping your whereabouts inside a chat, no map link gymnastics required. The catch? WhatsApp and iMessage have spoiled us with the same perk for years.

The feature lands in 2026

Android Police spotted the toggle buried in a beta build. Tap the plus icon, choose “location,” and a tiny map thumbnail streams your position until you kill it. Google is piggy-backing on the next revision of RCS—its SMS-on-steroids protocol—to push the update OTA to every carrier that still bothers to flip the switch. Translation: if your network drags its feet, you wait.

Parents tracking latch-key kids or festival-goers hunting lost mates will cheer. Everyone else will yawn. Meta-owned WhatsApp has offered live location since 2017; Apple added it to iMessage the same year. Google is arriving at the party with a bottle of flat soda and insisting it’s craft.

History remains hostage

Here’s the real choke-point. Swap phones and your years of sarcastic GIFs, grocery lists, and late-night confessions stay locked inside the old device unless you perform a full factory-image restore. WhatsApp backs up end-to-end encrypted chats to Google Drive or iCloud in minutes; iMessage syncs through Apple’s cloud as fast as your Wi-Fi allows. Google Messages, meanwhile, keeps your texts in a proprietary vault that treats a new IMEI like a forged passport.

Mountain View has prototyped a “restore” button, insiders say, but carriers must agree to host the keys. That meeting is scheduled for the twelfth of never. Until then, the app remains a gorgeous, spam-free, web-friendly dead end—perfect for people who never upgrade hardware and whose entire social circle lives inside the United States.

Google’s RCS rollout already felt like coaxing cats into a bathtub. Convincing two billion WhatsApp devotees to abandon the green-bubble lingua franca for a service that can’t even remember their jokes? Good luck with that.