Earlier this year, Google made major noise by releasing Latitude, a location-aware service that lets you see where your friends are on a map, on your phone. However, although it worked on a variety of handsets, including BlackBerry, there was one huge omission that has perhaps limited adoption and hype for the service: iPhone.
Today, that changes. Google has announced that there’s now a version of Latitude for iPhone and iPod Touch, although, it’s not a downloadable application like it is on other mobile platforms. Rather, iPhone users can simply navigate to google.com/latitude in Safari (
) to sign in, see where there friends are, and automatically update their location and status.
Why no downloadable app in iTunes? Google explains on their blog:
“We worked closely with Apple to bring Latitude to the iPhone in a way Apple thought would be best for iPhone users. After we developed a Latitude application for the iPhone, Apple requested we release Latitude as a web application in order to avoid confusion with Maps on the iPhone, which uses Google (
) to serve maps tiles.”
Google also notes that unlike the other mobile platforms that Latitude currently works on – Android (), Blackberry, Symbian and Window Mobile – your location will only be updated each time you use the app, since iPhone can’t run applications in the background. This could make the app a lot less interesting – on BlackBerry, the locations of the few friends I currently have on Latitude are changing all the time as it updates with their movements as opposed to when they directly access the app.
Nonetheless, bringing Latitude to 40 million iPhones and iPod Touch devices is nothing to scoff at, despite the current limitations. Latitude is one of Google’s more important and ambitious social products, and now, it has a more legitimate opportunity to succeed, though we’ll have to wait and see how users respond to a mobile browser-based version as opposed to a native app.