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Facebook Nearby Friends is gone. What to use instead

Facebook switched Nearby Friends off on 31 May 2022, along with Weather Alerts, Location History and Background Location. Facebook has shipped nothing in its place since. The live friend maps running in September 2026 are Snap Map, Instagram Map, Bump by amo, WhatsApp live location and, on iPhone only, Apple's Find My. None of them can tell you that a friend lands in your city next Thursday, because a map carries the position a phone reported a minute ago and nothing at all about the week after.

Eight months before it died, someone asked Reddit for it

September 2021, r/androidapps. Someone wanted an app that would ping friends automatically when they ended up near each other. The post sat at zero votes. Meeting people who "are in town occasionally but at irregular times" takes arranging, and asking them one at a time is worse, because "getting 'no' as an answer most of the time feels kind of awkward".

The thread got one reply: Facebook does that if you turn on location (thread). Eight months later Facebook stopped doing it. Four years on, a search for a Nearby Friends alternative still returns the 2022 shutdown coverage, and favshq.com ran the shutdown again on 4 September 2026 as a privacy story without naming one app you could install instead.

What Facebook actually shut down

Nearby Friends launched on 17 April 2014 as an opt-in feature on iOS and Android, built by the team that came with Facebook's 2012 acquisition of Glancee. It never dropped a pin on you. Friends who had also switched it on saw your distance in rough increments, "<0.5 miles, 0.7 miles, 1.8 miles", plus a neighbourhood in larger cities. TechCrunch's launch piece stated the rule: "You can only see your proximity to friends if you both have it turned on, and you can only see someone's exact location if they purposefully share it with you." Sharing your exact spot was a separate deliberate act with an expiry you picked, an hour, a few hours, until tomorrow, or until you stopped it by hand.

In October 2018 Facebook tested a redesign that looked a lot like Snap Map. It never shipped. Meta's notice, quoted by 9to5Mac on 5 May 2022, gave people 26 days and one sentence: "Nearby Friends and Weather alerts will no longer be available after May 31, 2022." TechCrunch's shutdown story filed the whole thing under a company that had lost the friend-finding market. Your location history stayed downloadable until 1 August 2022, then it was deleted. Three years after the switch-off Meta shipped a friend map again, on Instagram rather than Facebook.

Two questions people remember as one

Standing at a bar, you want to know whether anyone you know is within walking distance right now, in the next twenty minutes. That is a metres-and-minutes question, and every live map in the table below answers it the same way, by taking your position off your phone and putting it on someone else's screen. The last two rows answer something else entirely.

Whether anyone you know will be in Lisbon between the 12th and the 16th is a question for a calendar. No live map reaches it, because a friend who booked a flight for Thursday looks on the map exactly like a friend who is never coming. Nearby Friends blurred the two, since a lot of what people called "nearby" was really "in town for a few days", and the people who miss it hardest are the ones who used it in a city they passed through a few times a year.

The live maps that exist in September 2026

Skip Snapchat for a day and you vanish. Snap's own privacy page says so: "If you don't open the app for 24 hours, you won't be visible to friends on the Map until you open Snapchat again, unless you've chosen to share your live location with them indefinitely." Getting onto that map at all takes four separate acts, and the same page lists them. "You won't appear on your friends' Snap Map until you are bidirectional friends, open the Map for the first time, provide device location permission, and choose to share your location with your friends."

Instagram Map arrived on 6 August 2025 in the US and Canada. Sharing is off by default, and Adam Mosseri said the feature "requires a double consent by design", which did nothing to stop a wave of posts claiming the opposite. TechCrunch traced the panic to people "incorrectly claiming that it was enabled by default". Instagram spent 6 October 2025 on clarity fixes, adding a permanent sharing indicator, pulling profile photos out of Map content and announcing the India rollout. Yahoo had reported the European rollout under way four days earlier, on 2 October 2025. The dot updates lazily. Your position moves "when you open the app or have it running in the background", so what a friend reads on the map is where you last were.

Bump needs disambiguating, because two apps own the name. The one most people remember, where you tapped two phones together to swap a contact card, was bought by Google in September 2013 and pulled from both stores on 31 January 2014. It is not coming back. The current Bump is co.amo.android.location, from amo in Paris. Built partly by people out of Zenly, and updated as recently as 3 September 2026. Snap closed Zenly on 3 February 2023, roughly 40 million active users switched off in the same round as a 20 percent layoff, which is why half of these Reddit threads exist at all. I went through the honest replacements in Zenly alternatives that don't track you in real time.

Find My is free, excellent, and has no Android version at all. The App Store listing covers iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Apple Watch, and Apple's support page adds that if a Mac is all you own, you cannot share your location. A commenter on r/apps in November 2025 put the consequence better than I can, with the emoji left out: "Cries in Android. My entire friend group uses Find My and I'm just... not there."

Swarm is alive and healthy at version 7.0.41 as of early September 2026, and it solves a different problem. It logs where you went. What you end up with is a diary of your own movements, useful later and silent about everyone else. Foursquare shut City Guide down on 15 December 2024 and the web version on 28 April 2025, folding everything into Swarm. The App Store listing carries a warning: "This app may use your location even when it isn't open, which can decrease device battery life."

Nobody rebuilt the calendar half

Every option above wants your device's location, most of them in the background, and that is the trade people have got tired of making. From r/apps, November 2025: "Me and my friends have been trying to find a decent location sharing app that doesn't kill battery and doesn't make us feel like we're being tracked by our parents!"

Someone on r/digitalnomad wrote in December 2024: "Got many moments where I found out a friend was nearby but left already." Instagram stories told them afterwards. A perfect map would have told them during, if the friend was sharing and had opened the app that day, and if both of them had installed the same thing months earlier, back when neither had a reason to.

The trip you need to know about was almost always booked weeks ahead, and it sat in one person's calendar the whole time, or in an email confirmation nobody else could see.

What I built for the calendar question

I built Will U Be There for the second question, and it is deliberately useless for the first. You add a trip as a city plus two dates. Your friends do the same. When two trips land in the same city within 100 km with overlapping dates, both of you get a push notification, and each of you sees only that overlap, that city and those dates. The rest of your trip list stays private. If a friend lives in the city you are flying to and will actually be home that week, that counts as a match too. Miss someone by a few days and the app flags the near miss, so you can move a day if it is worth moving.

It never receives your live location. The app has no location permission to ask for, and nothing that would put a dot on a map. You type a city name and two dates, and that is the entire input, which also means it physically cannot show a friend where you are standing. If you want that, use Find My or Snap Map, and read what the app can and cannot know about you before you decide.

Friends who refuse to install another app are the normal case. Groups are the workaround: create one for a ski week or a conference, share a single link, and anyone who joins and adds a trip appears in your matches without any friend request. Up to 200 people per group. It still needs them to add the trip, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

It runs on iPhone and Android, it is free, there are no ads and no ad SDK, and data sits on Supabase in Ireland. Version 1.0.33 shipped on 28 August 2026.

For each trip you also get concerts, exhibitions, festivals and markets within 15 km of where you are staying, inside your dates, from hand-picked sources: tourist boards, city open-data portals, opera houses, ticketing platforms. On 6 September 2026 that is over 200,000 upcoming events across 57 countries from more than 360 sources, and coverage between cities is uneven enough that I would rather say so here than have you find out on your first trip.

What it will not do is tell you that someone you know is three streets away this evening. Nearby Friends took that question with it, and the five live maps above all want a location permission on your phone, which you may well decide is a fair price for a coincidence you get twice a year. If the calendar half is the part you missed, it is on the App Store and Google Play, and the first trip you add already shows you events even before a single friend joins.