By Disha Gupta
This year’s Google I/O, the tech giant announced that it would have satellite connectivity, at least in part, and rename Android’s Find My Device network to Find Hub. We are able to view an early version of the forthcoming feature due to new code strings found in the Find Hub app.
A recent Android Authority APK teardown claims that the Google Find Hub v3.1.399-3 release has a few text strings that make explicit reference to the future features. The publication said, the Find Hub app will send a “one-off ping with your location” when Android users share their location with others. This implies that rather than continuously transmitting your location in real-time, the app will drop a pin, similar to what Google Maps does.
Additionally, the coding implies that in places without a network, calling emergency services will not be replaced by Find Hub’s satellite location sharing feature. Find Hub will update your location every 15 minutes, but you might need to manually update it by returning to the app. This is in addition to the fact that it allows you to send single location pings to the individuals you are sharing your location with.
It turns out that there might be a daily cap on the number of times you can use satellites to ping your location, but we don’t yet know what that cap will be. But given that satellite connectivity is pretty limited and expensive to maintain, these restrictions sound fairly reasonable. According to reports, Google will also display the number of pings a user has left for the day and the amount of time they will need to wait before they can utilize the feature once more.
Google has not yet provided a date for when Find Hub will be made available to the general public, despite having previously stated that it would receive satellite connectivity at some point. However, some speculations suggest that, the functionality will be revealed during the Made by Google event, which is coming up and will see the tech giant introduce the highly anticipated Pixel 10 series phones.