In the age of the smartphone, we've become accustomed to knowing where our loved ones are at all times. This can be seen as positive and negative, depending on how you look at it. One negative could be that a loss of contact for any period of time can lead to paranoia. Of course, there's an app (or several) for that. Trusted Contacts was launched late last year, and it allows you to share locations with chosen contacts, as well as request their whereabouts. The app has now been updated to version 1.5, bringing customizable request timeouts and integration with Google Maps.

When someone requests your location in the app, the default behavior has been to wait 5 minutes before automatically sharing your location anyway. It's now possible to set this timeout to however long you like. Well, as long as it's 5, 15, 30, or 60 minutes. There's also an option to set this to 'immediately', meaning as soon as a permitted contact asks for your location it's shared with them. This is an app-level setting, unfortunately, so you can't have one timeout for one contact and a different timeout for another.

The other key addition is Google Maps integration, which makes it possible to share your location permanently with chosen contacts, as well as see them in Google Maps if they have the setting selected. It seems Google Maps was integrated to a certain extent before, but the update should make this more seamless. Other useful features are still there, such as instantly sharing your location with all your trusted contacts to indicate that you're safe.

You can also add contacts to the service using just a phone number now, which could be handy for friends or family using temporary devices. The app had mixed reviews when it first came out, but it's a great idea that will put a lot of people at ease if it's done right. Download it using the Play Store link below if you'd like to give it a go. Alternatively, you can grab the file from APKMirror and install it manually.