Apple files application to patent 'Find My Friends' locator system in India

The company claims its innovation helps users locate friends and family members, allows parents to keep a tab on children, offers temporary location identification services for business people

Consumer electronics major Apple Inc has applied for patent exclusivity for its friend finder application in India. The company claims that while using a GPS device to locate a friend would consume a lot of power, its invention has an advantage over the existing models.

Apple, which has a friend finder application called 'Find My Friends', has recently applied to the Indian patent office for its invention titled "Identifying and locating users on a mobile network".

The company claims that the innovation has a wide range of uses, such as locating friends and family members through their respective mobile devices, allowing parents to keep a tab on children and temporary location identification services for business people. 

The company claims a system for allowing users to learn the location of other users who have given permission to have their location shared. In one form of the invention, the user can log into an application and add friends and family members to location identification system, with their respective consent and get to know their location as and when required. If the request is for a group of users, the system would provide the locality, with lesser accuracy and if there is a request for a more accurate location following this, it would process the request accordingly.

The locating system works through a central system, which communicates with the sending and receiving the mobile device. The other user will have the option to reject the request for identifying his or her location. It also includes an option for the user to set a notification on certain location services. For instance, it could notify a parent if the son or daughter moves out from a particular location, which would call for their attention.

'Find My Friends' is a system through which the user can locate their friends and family from various Apple products including iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Apple Watch, or on iCloud.com.

Apple says that if the product is using iOS 9 or later, Find My Friends is automatically installed and for the previous iOS versions, a free app is available for installation.