Currently the DeltaChat location sharing feature allows it to be enabled for up to 6hrs. In many cases this is not sufficient. For example I am often doing longer hikes or bike rides and want my spouse know where I am. It is quite unfortunate that it disables itself mid hike/ride. Usually I forget to re-enable it. Its purpose should also be that the position is known when anything happens where I am not able to re-enable the position sharing (lets say Phone got lost/stolen).
Expected behavior
Having options to enable the Location sharing for much longer timespans (24hrs, 2 weeks, even permamently)
hi @cehteh, the main concern about allowing longer times in the official Delta Chat client is privacy issues, like someone getting access to your phone and enabling location sharing forever or days before you realize it, it could even be an archived chat.
That said I just added support to share location for 12 hours to DeltaLab 1.34.10, the app should be available in some hours here:
I had this concern too, but left this out for a start. We discussed this on IRC already some time ago. Personally I see this problem too, but do not want to compromise on the feature to enable location sharing for long (indefinite). My suggestion would be that for any timespan longer than 1 day (or 12hrs, whatever) Deltachat notifies the user once a day, via notification or toast message. OTOH I wont want to worry too much. If anyone gets the hands on your phone in a unlocked state they can invade your privacy much more by installing some malicious app that could do all kinds of bad things. The only privacy issue to address is that someone enables it and forgets about disabling it.
We should just show a sticky banner at the top in a green color, maybe even blinking or animated that location streaming is enabled and when pressing it you could get a list of chats that you share your location to and for how long with an easy way to disable it.
Thatās some UI work, but I think thatās the right solution IMO.
@adbenitez
Do you mean to use a third-party App?
Thatās what I would like to prevent.
Other messengers (e.g. Threema) use a button to attach the current location.
āLocation sharingā catch the current location send it and show it on a map. Why not add a option āsend location only one-timeā and do the same?
If there is no feature proposal for this yet then please create an extra topic for it.
POI is a Point Of Interest, if you are in the map view of the location streaming feature, then you should be able to tab to create a POI anywhere, at-least thatās how it works on desktop.
why is it complicated? I find it quite nice, you just open the map and can tap on places and send messages pointing to places like ālets meet in this barā or āhere lives my momā, I understand you want the feature to send current location once, but there is no need to magnify the issue to make it look impossible to live without that feature and all other features are āsuper complicatedā and can replace it
while you wait for a āsend location onceā feature, with the POI feature you can do the same as the share location once and do more, with the same number of taps, plus giving some nice personalized message, I donāt think it is the end of the world without that feature, and you can also just share location for 5 minutes, that wouldnāt kill anyone as well, or cancel the sharing after only 1min or some seconds
a more interesting feature proposal, would be to have a way to jump from these messages in the chat, to the map view and have the map centered in the POI, but I guess we are getting too offtopic in this thread that is about sharing for long periods of time, you can create a thread about āshare location onceā if it doesnāt exists and we can continue to discuss the topic without disturbing this thread
@adbenitez
I know, you donāt need this feature. I have learned if you donāt need something, you fight against it like a Tiger. I donāt understand why. I like your developing skills. But sometimes I really would like to mute all conversations with you. Sorry, but conversation with you is more complicated then send a POI.
And yes, I can live without this feature. I can live without DeltaChat at all.
I think itās a really nice feature. And I also know there are many people out there who would like this feature.
Hopefully you stop putting your opinion in this thread. Hopefully other people without this āIm against it because I donāt need it!ā have also a opinion about this really cool feature.
Blockquote if there is no feature proposal for this yet then please create an extra topic for it.
This was my plan until @adbenitez started his discussion.
Probably I will pause my support for Delta Chat for a while. I donāt like to spend my sparetime with fruitless discussions.
Sorry and thank you (and all others) for your attention all the time. Also for unattractive requests.
wtf ā¦ this discussion got derailed, I personally would like any of the features mentioned above but it be nice if we discuss here about my proposal, stay goal oriented without anyone feeling bad about it. Of course I want to see this implemented (otherwise i wouldnāt have suggested it), if it gets rejected on technical, social or resource based arguments then let it be. But if this discussion leaves anyone sour and dies off because of that I am pretty disappointed.
Brainfart: I havenāt looked at the code, but I guess that when a user selects a timespan it actually calculates the absolute time when the location sharing shall be disabled internally? If so, why not offer the user a calendar picker widget where the absolute time can be selected directly (below the fixed intervals). This could be pretty convenient for all use case I imagine: setting it to the next day, end of vacation, some arbitrary date 10 years in the future (thatāll be practically permanently enabled).
It wont clutter the UI with some more options, nor would we need to discuss which intervals suit best without overflowing with too much options.
Dear @webratte, I am not against your feature proposal (that is out of place of this thread, as well as this reply, so sorry @cehteh for continuing, hopefuly with this message the offtopic ends here)
indeed I would like the option to āshare location onceā as well, I was giving you a temporal solution that works today until such feature arrives, and you were negating my alternative proposed solution like someone inflexible with a fixed idea or purpose in their mind negating anything else if it is not the exact thing you want. And in general, I was just giving my opinion about the feature, and other similar features and their relevance.
If the āshare location onceā was a trivial thing to add without open questions and changes in core, I would have added it already to the Android app, the same way I added an extra option to share location for 12 hours. It is not that devs are against you or wants to cancel some feature proposal, if it has not been added yet, even after you mention it several times in Delta Chat groups and here, is for other more technical reasons, that has nothing to do with personal feelings or wanting to be a āTigerā for no good reason.
Hope you stick around, and your wished feature gets added at some point
it seems you are forgetting what has been said already to you here (or was it on IRC some time ago?) the issue is not that we are stuck with a list to select a few options because we donāt know how to add a calendar picker, the issue is that it is intentional to not offer a calendar or long periods of time to enable the location sharing because the feature could be enabled for days or forever to track you and currently it is not easy to see to what chats you are sharing location, most Delta Chat developers are really serious about user privacy and avoiding Delta Chat becoming a way to track their users, hence why there is resistance in de developer team to allow location sharing for long periods of time.
The solution, (as mentioned by Simon IIRC) would be to add an sticky header/note at the top of Delta Chat window or in the chat list view, notifying that location sharing is enabled in some chats, then user are always aware of it and tapping the banner/notification shows a list of chats where location sharing is enabled, then we can allow user to select location sharing from a calendar, or to share forever (probably still some will complain since if you donāt open the app you donāt know that the app is sharing location in background)
adding first the feature to be more aware of location sharing is some work in all Delta Chat clients, that needs to be done before then more UI work to allow to select from a calendar or other improvements to allow more flexible location sharing times, hope this clarifies why your proposal is not added immediately
that said, I already mentioned to you, you can use DeltaLab temporarily if you really need sharing location for 12 hours ātodayā, isnāt 12 hours enough for your bike, etc use case?
I never discussed about anyone about a calendar picker iirc. that was just an idea I had.
I am well aware of the privacy implications. This is something that should be sorted out in this thread, as Simon suggested. For me personally this is low priority, but I wont want that DC is used to track users without their consent.
However: this is totally unrelated to using a calendar widget. After all we define a time span, no more no less. The ālogicā on any kind of these notification would stay the same.
IF location_streaming_is_active(/*optional: for more than X hours in the future*/) THEN
display_non_cancelable_notification()
Actually just another Idea: if someone selects a timespan longer than X then it should display a warning āYou selected to enable location sharing for more than X hours do you want to Proceed/Abortā. Rationale: instead someone maliciously enabling location sharing I also see some āfatty fingerā cause where oneself accidentally enables it for longer than intended.
I havenāt tried DeltaLab yet and for my personal use case I would like much longer time spans than 12Hours (even infinitely).
I am not very versed on Electron, my best guess would be that adding a calendar picker would be pretty much stock code/existing widget. As far it goes for the internals and rust backend I may eventually look into this myself. But first things first, I would like some consent here what could and should be implemented.
I donāt think a date picker makes sense until you can select long periods of time, also that would need a time spinner to select hours and minutes, basically the same picker than for the phoneās alarm app I guess, in general you also donāt need super fine-control over this, so I bet probably it is more user friendly to just offer some options as of now, with maybe 2 or 3 extra options, like ā1 day, 1 week, foreverā additional to the current preset
).
