Foursquare, Gowalla, Scavngr, Facebook Places, all of these have the same basic premise: sharing your location with the world. You check-in to your favorite spots and tell everyone following you about the places you visit. Along the way you earn badges and prizes, unlock hidden items and complete lengthy goals. It’s a neat system, but it’s not for everyone.
What if you don’t want all that fluff? Even more, what if you don’t exactly want the whole world to know where you are at every waking moment? How do you quickly shoot off your location to a friend or two for a meet up that isn’t publicized on the web? Enter Flares, a location-sharing app with two primary goals: simplicity and privacy.
Getting Started
When you first open Flares, you’ll be asked to create an account. This consists of little else than your name and telephone number. You’ll never have to log in or remember a password, the app is tied to your specific phone and number.
Once you give Flares your phone number, you’ll be sent a text message with a four digit pin to verify that you are indeed who you say you are. Once you type in that pin, you should be good to go.
The sign up process
The text message should come in almost immediately. If it takes longer than ten minutes, you can try resetting your account and going through the process again or contacting the developers for help.
If you’re a Verizon iPhone user and have recently attempted this step to no avail, the most recent update of the app will solve any problems you were experiencing.
The Main Screen: Your Location
As you’ll find, Flares is an incredibly simple app void of bells and whistles of any kind. The main screen simply shows a map with your current location with the options to shoot a flare or view your contacts. And that’s it!
The primary screen shows your location
A Quick Design Note
As you can see from the screenshots above, the first thing you’ll notice about this app is that it looks great. The dark, typography-centric theme feels really classy and the UI is extremely efficient.
Another touch that I particularly like is the vignette in the location map. Typically, apps that incorporate a Google map don’t change the appearance much and it’s nice to see someone break that trend even in a slight way.
Adding Friends
To add friends to Flares, simply tap on the “Contact Book” button at the lower right and select any friends you have with iPhones and the Fares app installed.
Select a friend with an iPhone
Having a friend will give you someone to shoot a flare to, i.e., share your location with. Adding them here is just a preliminary step and won’t shoot off any flares yet.
Sending and Receiving Flares
Now we come to the core functionality of the application. When you’re ready to share your location with someone, tap on the “shoot flare button.” This will bring you to your Contact Book screen where you will have the option to quickly select which of your Flares friends you would like to include.
Once you’re done, tap “shoot” and you will both see and hear the flare shoot off!
Only send a flare to the people you choose.
If you’re on the receiving end, you’ll see a notification that tells you one of your friends has sent you a flare. If you opt to view it, you’ll be taken to another interactive Google map, this time with their location on it.
The map now shows the location of you and your friend
At the bottom of this map is a link that will take you into the official iPhone maps application for directions. That’s really all there is to it!
Praise and Suggestions
First off, Flares is a beautiful app that nearly perfectly accomplishes what it sets out to. The slick, simple interface makes it both enjoyable and easy to share your location with only a select group of friends.
That being said, I would personally like to see a number of additions before I can call myself completely satisfied here. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of focused, simple applications, but there’s a fine line between focused and lacking.
The Flares feature set is just a little on the bare side. For instance, there is no news feed or history of any sort to see if you successfully sent a flare to who you intended to, or even to view recent flares sent to you by other users. I think a simple history page would really go a long way towards making new users confident that everything is working correctly.
The ability to add custom messages and replies to a Flare would definitely be an awesome addition as well. This way you could send your location and say something like “I’m here with some friends, you should stop by!”
My biggest problem with the app though lies in the overall business strategy. At only $0.99, it’s perfectly affordable, but the fact that there’s no free component means that it’s not going to be easy to convince many of my friends to also download the app. Consequently, I don’t really have anyone I can share my location with, and I suspect the large majority of users share this limitation.
To make the app useful for a large number of users, there absolutely needs to be an option to send out a flare as a simple text message to any phone. This would allow me to take advantage of my fancy location app while skipping the awkward step of begging my friends to join. If they have Flares, great, if not, they would simply receive a text message with the address of my current location.
Without this key feature I simply don’t see many people using this app. However, with this simple addition it instantly becomes an awesome and quick response to the common question “Where are you?”
Conclusion
Flares is a great app with a great idea: completely private location sharing without all the noise and silly games found in every other app in the location genre. The interface is stunning and the app performs for the most part without a hitch.
Give Flares a shot and let us know what you think in the comments below. Does the idea of private location sharing appeal to you more than something public?