Find people is rolling out on Wear OS, but it’s not for finding people

Google’s new Find people feature for Wear OS looks pretty limited at first glance. You can’t use your watch to start sharing your location, and you can’t pull up a map showing where someone else is. But that’s because the feature doesn’t really seem intended to work both ways. Its more useful job is letting other people keep track of you when your phone isn’t around.

As 9to5Google spotted, Find people is now appearing on Wear OS as part of Find Hub, and the watch app handles most of the setup elsewhere. If you haven’t already configured location sharing, it will simply show an “Open on phone” button. Once you start sharing your location with someone through Find Hub on your phone, that person then appears on the watch under “Can see your location,” along with how long the sharing session will last. This uses Google’s existing Location Sharing system, the same underlying setup when people tracking arrived in Find My Device.

But the handiest bit is what happens if you have an LTE watch and leave your phone behind. The watch can continue sharing your location using its own GPS, so the person you’ve already shared with can still see where you are. Going out for a run without lugging your phone along is an obvious example.

That also helps explain why Find people feels so stripped back on the watch. It isn’t trying to turn your wrist into a miniature version of Find Hub where both people can track each other. If you want to see the other person’s location, the watch sends you back to your phone. On Wear OS, the focus is much more on keeping your own location available to the people you’ve already chosen.

There’s also a Location Sharing control on the watch. Turning it on for the first time brings up explanatory screens about how the system works, while turning it off stops that watch from sharing your location across Google apps. Google also makes clear that merely revoking location permission from Find people won’t stop Location Sharing from the device.