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How to know when a friend will be in your city (no location sharing)

A friend posts a photo of Praca do Comercio in Lisbon on Wednesday. You were four streets away on Monday. They flew home on Tuesday. What catches that in advance is dull: two people type a city and two dates into the same place, and something compares the two entries and pushes a notification to both phones when the dates touch.

Find My, Google Maps sharing and Instagram Map would all have missed it. Each of them answers where a person is right now. The question here has a tense in it: where will they be, and on which days.

The near miss, in the words of the people having it

r/digitalnomad, 23 December 2024: "Got many moments where I found out a friend was nearby but left already." Six and a half years earlier, on r/AppIdeas, somebody had written down the same gap: "Just random found out from an Instagram post but would have been cool to know ahead of time." Apps did ship in between. Both of those subreddits ended up pointing somebody at Overlap, which Pangea bought in November 2025.

The version that stings sits on r/expats, 24 March 2025, 139 upvotes and 146 comments: "I have friends visiting the country I live, they even coincidentally got a hotel next to my job, but they didn't make plans to hang out." The top reply, at 313 upvotes, is "1. Suggest a time and place for dinner. 2. Get better friends." Most of that thread argues about hurt feelings. Underneath it sits a scheduling failure that nobody in the thread names as one.

Then the fallback, from r/androidapps, 10 September 2021: "asking if they're there manually and getting 'no' as an answer most of the time feels kind of awkward". Asking costs you something every time. The answer is usually no, and after the third no you stop.

What people try instead, and where it breaks

People pin friends onto Google My Maps. From r/digitalnomad, 13 July 2019: "I started to use Google MyMaps to pin the friends I have in each city but it's not really convenient and I wonder if there's a better way to keep track of where do live the friends you make when you travel." The pins stay accurate for years and never once do anything. My Maps has no mechanism for telling you that one of those pins is about to be in Porto the same week you are. The map would have to be open at the moment you book the flight.

The shared calendar is the next thing people try. r/digitalnomad, 28 February 2018: "My friends and I had a shared google calendar that we entered all our plans into but that kind of fell apart. What are some alternatives?" Upkeep lands on whoever in the group is most organised, and they burn out around month four. Google Calendar's sharing permissions run from "See only free/busy (hide details)" through "See event details" to three levels of edit access, and not one of them is a comparison. A calendar can hold the word Berlin twice. Nothing inside it watches for the week those two Berlins overlap.

Then a spreadsheet. From r/travel, 11 February 2023: "We have previously used a google sheet and various group chats - it was AWFUL." Same defect as the calendar, minus the reminders. A sheet helps on the days you open it, and those days thin out fast.

Most of these discoveries happen on Instagram, and Instagram works, in the sense that you do find out. You find out on day three of a five-day trip. Sometimes in the week after they flew home.

Location sharing answers a different question

Apple's Find My shares your location "with friends and family in real time", for an hour, a day, or indefinitely. It is the best-built thing in this category and it stops at the edge of Apple's hardware. From r/apps, 26 November 2025: "My entire friend group uses Find My and I'm just... not there."

Google Maps location sharing is cross-platform and continuous. The people you share with see your name, profile picture, real-time location and battery status. It is off by default, and it says nothing about next month.

Instagram Map arrived on 6 August 2025, opt-in, off unless you turn it on, visible only to people you pick, and it updates when you open the app or have it running in the background. That is better privacy design than anything else in this section.

These products also shut down a lot. Zenly closed on 3 February 2023, with roughly 35 million monthly actives behind it on TechCrunch's count. Facebook Nearby Friends went on 31 May 2022, and Meta's stated reason was "we're deprecating some location-based features on Facebook due to low usage". Overlap was acquired by Pangea in November 2025. Its App Store listing now returns a 404. If you build a habit on one of these, budget for rebuilding it.

There is also the plain refusal, from r/socialskills, 16 March 2018: "no one wants to share their location nor what they are doing at any given time." A tool whose first screen asks for an always-on location permission loses part of the friend group at that screen, before anybody has typed anything.

Every option, compared

Checked on 6 September 2026. Prices and versions move, so check anything you are about to act on before you rely on it.

The rows above TripSynq all answer "now". If the photo from Lisbon is your problem, the rows below that line are the ones with a date in them. A fuller inventory of the smaller apps, including the ones that have since been acquired or abandoned, is in my longer comparison of these apps.

The best app for this depends on who your friends are

If your entire circle is on iPhone and what you want is a dot moving across a map, install Find My and stop reading. It is already on the phone and it costs nothing. No third-party app has beaten it at that job.

One Android phone in the group rules out Find My. Cross it off. That single fact removes the most popular answer to this question for a large share of friend groups.

Pangea is the serious option if you want the largest social layer around travel. It has an active product, organic recommendations on Reddit and the acquisition of Overlap behind it, and its App Store listing declares both coarse and precise location collection.

When the sticking point is permissions rather than platform, the shortlist is TripSynq, YouInTown, CitySync and mine, all four free as of September 2026. ANEAR sits next to that list rather than in it. Its FAQ says location data is processed on the device and shared with nobody, and the app still asks for the permission. YouInTown says it shows your city and "never your street, neighborhood, or GPS coordinates". You type the city in, or let the app detect it. Both pages take two minutes to read, and they are specific in a way the store listings are not.

LetsOverlap reads flights and hotels out of your phone calendar, so the trips arrive without anybody typing them, which is the step people quit on. It is iPhone only, which puts it back where Find My is.

Setting this up in an evening

Start with the list. Write down the eight to twelve people you would rearrange a day for, which is a much smaller set than your contacts and a different set from your followers. These are the people whose presence in a city changes what you do that week.

Then enter the trips you already know about. Most people can name three: the Christmas trip home, the conference in March, the wedding in June. Two dates and a city each, thirty seconds apiece. Add your home city as well, because a friend landing in the city you live in matches the same way a trip of your own would, and a home city is one entry you never have to touch again.

Then leave it alone until something pushes at you. A system that needs weekly attention is the shared calendar again, and you know how that ended. Three trips and a home city is four entries, and unless you book something new that is the last time you open it until a notification arrives.

What I built for this

I built Will U Be There for the version of this problem that has a date in it. It is free on iPhone and Android, built by one person in Amsterdam. It does one thing. You add a trip as a city and two dates, your friends do the same, and when two trips land within 100 km of each other on overlapping dates, both phones get a notification. A friend's home city counts as a match too, as long as they are not away on a trip of their own that week. Miss someone by three days and it tells you that as well, which is often enough time to move a flight.

What a friend sees is the overlap and nothing else: that city, those dates. The rest of your trip list stays invisible, with no shared map and no feed of where you have been.

It never receives your location, in the background or with the app open. The only geography in the system is the city name you typed and the coordinates of that city, so the app cannot show a friend where you are standing, for the same reason your calendar cannot. There is no location permission to grant, and nothing running in the background to drain the battery. If you want live tracking, everything on this page above the table does it better.

Make a group for the ski week, or for a friend circle, send one link, and anyone who opens it and adds a trip starts matching against you. That covers the friends who are not on the app, since nobody has to find you by username and there are no friend requests inside it. Up to 200 people per group. It is still an install, and some people will not do it. I wrote about what actually moves that number separately.

Every trip also pulls concerts, exhibitions, festivals and markets within 15 km of where you are staying, inside your dates, from tourist boards, city open-data portals, opera houses and ticketing sites picked by hand. That is over 200,000 upcoming events across 57 countries on 6 September 2026, out of more than 360 named sources. Coverage is uneven, and some cities are far denser than others. Many are free entry. You can RSVP Going or Maybe and see which friends are going. The events are the reason the app does anything at all before any of your friends join.

It does not plan a trip for you, and it does not record one afterwards the way a travel diary would. It will not introduce you to strangers, and live tracking belongs to Find My. It takes no bookings and splits no bills. Sign-in is Apple, Google, or a six-digit email code that expires in 15 minutes. Data sits in the EU, on Supabase in Ireland and Sentry in Frankfurt, with push notifications the one part that travels through Google. There are no ads and no ad SDK, and the export button hands you a JSON file with every trip, friend and group in it. What the database can and cannot know is set out on the privacy page.

It is on the App Store and Google Play, in 17 languages, version 1.0.33.

The one case none of this fixes

Every group has someone who writes nothing down. The flight gets booked nine days out, off a hunch and a cheap fare, and no overlap tool will catch that, because there is nothing on their side to compare against. What the app can offer that person is the group link, with no request to accept, and a trip typed the night before the flight still matches if the dates touch. I have not found a way to make them type it in.