LumelaA field with 40,000 people
'Near the food trucks' describes about six hundred metres. On a map it's a pin, and the group walks straight to it instead of describing landmarks to each other over a bad line.
📍 Live location
Find each other. Then turn it off.
Location sharing is one of those features that is either extremely useful or extremely creepy, and the difference is entirely in the defaults. Lumela's are simple: off unless you turn it on, only inside one group, and honest about how fresh the data is.
The problem it actually solves
It isn't tracking. It's the twenty minutes you spend standing in one place, calling people.
Two cars, one destination
The second car stopped for coffee an hour ago and hasn't answered. One glance tells you whether to order food or wait — no phone call, no guessing.
A city nobody knows
Everyone splits up for the afternoon and agrees to meet at six. At quarter to, you can see who is already close and who is still four neighbourhoods away.
How it works
Control
Off by default, on when it's useful
You switch sharing on for a group, and you switch it off when you're done. It isn't buried in a settings screen, and it doesn't quietly re-enable itself. If you're in several groups, sharing with one doesn't share with the others.
- Explicit opt-in, per group
- Stop sharing at any time, immediately
- Nothing is shared outside the group
- No ads, so no reason to profile you
Honesty
A stale pin says it's stale
In the places you most need this — festivals, canyons, basements — updates stop arriving. Showing the last known position as if it were live is worse than showing nothing, so the app tells you when each person was last reported and treats old data as old.
- Per-person 'last updated' timestamps
- Multiple devices per person handled correctly
- A quiet presence dot shows who has the app open now
- Positions expire instead of lingering forever
Questions about privacy
Is my location shared all the time?
No. Sharing is off until you turn it on, it applies to one group at a time, and you can stop it at any moment. There is no background mode that quietly keeps broadcasting after you thought you'd stopped.
Who can see it?
Only members of the group you shared with. Not other groups you're in, not the public, not advertisers. Location data isn't sold or used to build a profile of you — the app has no ads to target in the first place.
What happens when I lose signal?
Your pin stops updating, and the app says so. It shows how long ago each person's position was reported rather than leaving a stale dot looking current — which is the difference between 'they're at the gate' and 'they were at the gate forty minutes ago'.
Does it drain the battery?
It costs meaningfully more than having the app closed, which is why it's off by default. Most groups run it for a few hours — arrival, a meet-up, the drive home — and switch it off the rest of the time.
Full details are in the privacy policy.
Stop calling each other in a field
Turn it on when the group splits up. Turn it off when you're home.