If you’ve ever needed to track down your Android-wielding friends on a night out, you’ll be disappointed by this news: Google is playing the role of product serial killer once again, this time claiming Latitude as its latest victim.
Latitude is — or was — a nifty little product that helped you get a GPS fix on your friends. It started as a separate app, but then found its way into the official Maps application for Android as a nifty overlay. iOS got its own Latitude app which never saw the service roll in to a dedicated maps application.
It was a service that used background GPS reporting and absolutely devoured your battery life, but it was handy to have nevertheless: go out for a night on the town, lose your mates in a pub, can’t rally them all up to head home, boot up Latitude to figure out one of them has gone home with that pretty girl he was talking to.
Google is replacing Latitude with a feature in Google+ that will let you share your location, but right now that’s only a feature that works in Android.
Latitude will stop working on 9 August and the news of its death comes amidst a massive Maps update that sees Google roll-out all the beautiful improvements we saw at I/O.
Here’s the Latitude’s death note from Google today:
Hello,
Earlier today, we announced that Google Latitude is no longer part of the Google Maps app, and we’re retiring Latitude on August 9, 2013.
This means that after August 9, your Latitude friends list will be deleted and you’ll lose the ability to share your location with them. There will also be some changes to Location Reporting and Location History, including changes to third-party applications that use Google Latitude. Please see our FAQs for more information.
We understand some of you still want to see your friends and family on a map, which is why we’ve added location sharing to Google+ for Android (coming soon to iOS).
Thank you for using Google Latitude.
Sincerely,The Google Latitude Team
Vale, Google Latitude.