Google finally adds Latitude to iPhone, but as a toothless web app

July 23, 2009 | Kim-Mai Cutler | Comments | |

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Commence geostalking on the iPhone.

Google added Latitude to Apple’s smartphone today, but it’s on the web instead of in the app store. Latitude, which came out in February, is a social layer over maps that shows your location in real-time. Google said it chose the web route because Apple was concerned users would confuse Latitude with Maps. However, Google vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra provocatively declared last week at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference that it viewed browser-based apps as the future, instead of closed environments like the app store.

Latitide can also show your friends’ locations, so you can log-in, see if any friends happen to be nearby and spontaneously meet up. (Naturally, it also raises major privacy concerns, although Google is careful to emphasize that you can control with whom and how your location is disclosed.)

The iPhone edition of Latitude comes without teeth, because there’s no mechanism for applications to run in the background on the iPhone. This means this version of Latitude won’t update your location continuously the way it does for Android, Blackberry, Symbian and Windows Mobile users. (This would be true even if Latitude was a native application, but then at least it could remind you where your friends are via push notification, like location-based social app Foursquare.) This is a massive barrier, because it means you won’t get live locations for your iPhone-using friends unless they check in at www.google.com/latitude constantly.

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About the Author, Kim-Mai Cutler

Kim-Mai was born and raised a stone's throw from Apple headquarters in Cupertino by a devout Hewlett-Packard family. After attending UC Berkeley, Kim-Mai worked for Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires in New York, Los Angeles, London and Buenos Aires. Follow her on Twitter at @kimmaicutler, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • steph12345
    That is so cool.. www.SocialLifeWorld.com
  • belugalove
    I am not sure what your point is here: are you concerned primarily about privacy concerns or do feel that someones social live might suffer due to not being able to track their friends at any given moment on an iPhone?

    As far as I know the iPhone can multitask, so if google put out an app you could still track your friends and listen to your favorite tunes, so what is the point you are making precisely?
  • Ummm, the whole point of Latitude is to see where ur friends are b/c the GPS keeps track of them automatically.

    And NO the iPhone can not multitask. Opening a streaming media link doesn't actually rely on the web browser to play the media, so "Goodman Holiday's" example isn't quit the same. How about running Google maps, while listening to streaming music, with the web browser running in the background?

    Google Latitude won't update automatically (unless someone makes it keep refreshing every few secs)
  • Er.. but native apps like Safari DO run in the background on the iPhone. That's why with OS 3.0 you can stream an internet radio station in Safari and it'll keep playing in Safari even after you exit the app. Try opening http://66.224.103.98:11930/listen.pls in Safari and it'll begin playing in the browser, and continue when you exit.

    As to whether Google Lattitude will be able to continuously update automatically from Safari, I have no idea.
  • Has anyone tried Find My Friend? (app store)
  • Failed on the iPhone for now.