Over the past couple of years, we've seen many iterations on the personal safety app, but the gist has always remained the same: choose a few persons you trust to share your location with all the time, or at least when you feel the need or they request it. Now Google is releasing its own official take on the matter, Trusted Contacts, and part of me is wishing this app or its functionality at least becomes integrated in all Android phones from now on.

Trusted Contacts doesn't deviate a lot from the formula: you add your closest friends and/or family members as trusted contacts so they can:

  • Easily see your status: if you've moved recently or you're online, it shows you were "active recently" to stop them from freaking out if they can't reach you.
  • Request your location: the request shows up on your phone and you can deny it if everything is good and you're just busy, or if it goes unanswered for 5 minutes, the request passes through and your last known location is sent to them, even if you are offline now.
  • Share your location for a period of time: if you're feeling unsafe or you tend to go to risky places or stay out at risky times, you can choose a contact to share your location with for a specific amount of time until you're safe again.

Trusted Contacts is live on the Play Store now and seems to be available to everyone, but we'll update the post with the APK when we have it. Go ahead and install it now on your phone and ask your family and friends to do so too, because this is the kind of app where by the time you wish you had it, it could already be too late.

UPDATE: 2016/12/05 7:49am PST BY

Here's the APK file to manually grab the app if it's not available for your device or country.

Source: Google