Location & the Live Map

Location sharing is an internal tool. Turning it on puts a technician on your dispatch map and builds their location history. It does not show a customer where anybody is, and there is no setting that makes it.

The reason is specific rather than abstract. A technician setting off for a job usually sets off from home, and a live position on a customer's screen tells that customer where their technician lives. That is not a trade any employee agreed to when they turned a toggle on.

Two messages, both sent from the job page by the technician, and neither carrying a position:

The ETA is measured once. It is a promise about when somebody set off, not a countdown that quietly re-times itself while the customer watches.

A technician opts in from their own settings. Sharing then reports while the app is open, and stops on its own in the situations where continuing would be wrong:

The limitation above is the reason the app exists. On Android, a technician can switch on background location and the phone reports its position about once a minute while they are clocked in — driving, with the screen off, with the app closed. This is the version that makes the dispatch map useful for finding who is nearest, and the version that marks somebody as arrived without them pressing anything.

The rules are stricter than the browser's, deliberately:

• The technician turns it on themselves and grants Android's "Allow all the time" permission. Nobody can do it for them.
• It runs only while they are clocked in, and stops the instant they clock out.
• It does not run on a day covered by approved time off.
• Android shows a notification the whole time, which cannot be dismissed.
• They can withdraw it at any moment, from the app's own settings.

A business that has switched on automatic clock-on widens the second rule and nothing else: a shift that begins on arrival needs positions from before the shift, so on a day somebody is scheduled, and inside working hours, the phone reports against the job they are due at until that shift exists. It is the only case in which anything is collected before the clock is running, it is off by default, and it is described in the consent the technician agrees to — changing what is collected asks everybody again rather than carrying the old answer forward.

Their existing "Share my location" preference still governs everything: with it off they do not appear on the map at all, whatever the app is doing. See The Android App & Offline Work.

Positions go to the dispatch map through a relay rather than the database, so a live map costs no database writes. Positions are then buffered and stored in batches — 200 positions or a minute, whichever comes first — because a write per technician per minute all day, for rows only ever read in bulk, is a lot of writes for nothing.

The map is also where “who is nearest” lives. Ranking your technicians by straight-line distance to a job is free and unlimited; asking for actual road drive times costs a metered lookup. See Scheduling & Dispatch.

Under Reports → Locations, pick a person and a day and you get their trail: the roads taken, plotted from the positions collected, with markers at the jobs rather than at every turn. Segments are grouped by job, with distance and duration for each.

It is gated on the permission to view team locations, which is separate from the ordinary team permissions — being able to manage somebody's shifts should not automatically mean being able to retrace their day.