My dad gets confused sometimes and I need to go pick him up. But he doesn’t always know where he is. Can I teach him how to share his current location with me via text message or email?
My first thought is that you can turn on Find My iPhone and use that to track his location [you can learn more about it on the Apple Web site, but be aware that there are some privacy implications that you want to think about before you start tracking his phone in real time 24×7]. Turns out that it’s pretty darn easy to share your current location with someone on the iPhone, though, so let’s step through that and you can decide for yourself if your Dad can handle the few steps, or whether you’d rather just rely on the Find My iPhone feature instead.
To start, know that you need to have the Maps app handy on the iPhone, perhaps on the home screen. And that the very first step when you launch Maps is to always tap on the triangle on the lower left corner:
Once you’ve tapped on the triangle, the phone will ensure that it has your current location centered on the map.
Now tap on the square on the top right with the arrow coming out of it.
This’ll work whether you’re in “Maps” or “Satellite” view, too:
That’s two taps.
Now just tap on the green “Message” button to send it as a text message:
Once sent, here’s what you’d receive on your own iPhone or in the Messages app on your Mac system:
If you want to sent is an email instead, you can do that too, and it embeds latitude / longitude information into the link itself, as is hinted by the clickable link shown:
That’s it. I really hope this helps you out.
All you need Dad to do is learn three taps (triangle, share, message) and how to enter your name, and tap send and he’s as good as found.