Live Location Now

My location live now: what the tracker shows

• Current location live: your position on the map, updated every one to five seconds while you move.
• My live coordinates: latitude and longitude to six decimal places, with the accuracy radius in meters.
• My position now by place name: the town or city and country you are in, refreshed as you travel.
• Live position, speed and heading: how fast and in which direction you are going.
• My location live map with your route: a line along the path you have taken, the distance covered, and a GPX download.

To track my location now, keep this page open and in front: this GPS tracking live location view follows you like a live GPS tracker, so you can see my location right now and my current location live on the live location map until you tap Stop. It is live GPS tracking in the browser, a real-time GPS location tracker with nothing to install. For a single reading of where you are, your address and your coordinates, useMy Location instead: it shows your current location once, with the nearest street address.

Live vs. one-shot — the difference matters

Most location tools return a single fix and then go quiet. You tap, you see a coordinate, the page is done. That is fine if you are standing still and want to copy your position into a form (the iPhone Compass app or Google Maps can do that too; see how to find GPS coordinates on any device). It is useless the moment you start moving — the pin stays where you were five seconds ago.

Live tracking is the opposite. The page asks the browser to keep handing back new readings as the GPS receiver computes them. The browser provides this through a standard call called watchPosition: you supply a callback once, and it fires every time the operating system has a fresh fix to report. That is exactly what the tool above does, and it is why the “Updates” counter rises on its own while the “Live” badge is showing.

The tool asks for the strictest settings the API allows: enableHighAccuracy: true so the OS powers up the GPS receiver rather than settling for Wi-Fi, maximumAge: 0 so it never replays a cached fix, and a timeout of 20 seconds before it reports that no reading arrived.

My live coordinates and each live GPS reading explained

Every update the browser delivers carries more than a coordinate. Here is what each tile in the tracker shows, and when it is allowed to be blank under the W3C Geolocation API specification.

For how the browser decides which of these values to fill in, see our guide tohow the browser Geolocation API works.

Real-time location: how live GPS tracking works

Inside your phone, the GPS chip is solving the same equation several times per second. It hears timestamps from four or more satellites overhead and back-solves for the only position on Earth where those particular delays line up. When you walk, the math changes — you are slightly closer to one satellite, slightly farther from another — and the chip outputs a new coordinate. The operating system passes that coordinate up to the browser, which passes it to this page, which redraws the dot.

Two practical knobs decide how lively the “live” reading actually feels. The first is the GPS sample rate, which most chipsets run at 1 Hz (one fix per second) by default. The second is the operating system’s smoothing layer, which sometimes withholds a new reading if it has not changed enough to matter. A clean outdoor walk should generate one update every second or two; a stationary indoor reading often updates only every five to ten seconds because the OS sees no real movement.

Track my location now: live location map, path and distance

While tracking is on, the map draws a line along the route you have taken and the Distance tile adds up its length. GPS jitter would normally turn a person standing still into a growing scribble, so the tracker is strict about which readings join the path: a new point is only added once you have moved at least 10 meters from the last one, and only from a reading accurate to 50 meters or better. Standing still therefore adds nothing, and a sudden indoor Wi-Fi guess hundreds of meters off is left out.

The trade-off is that very small movements, like pacing around a room, will not register. The path and distance reset each time you tap Start live tracking, and nothing is kept once you close the tab unless you download it first.

Save your route as a GPX file

Once the path has two points, a Download route (GPX) button appears under the readings. GPX is the standard file format for GPS tracks (version 1.1, published by Topografix), so Strava, Komoot, Garmin Connect, Google Earth and most hiking apps can open it. Each point in the file carries its latitude and longitude, the time it was recorded, and the altitude when the device reported one. The file holds exactly the points drawn on the map, after the 10-meter and 50-meter filters above.

The file is assembled by JavaScript in your browser and saved straight to your device; it is not uploaded anywhere first. You can download it while still tracking or after tapping Stop. To measure the straight-line gap between where you started and where you ended, paste both coordinates into the distance calculator.

Enabling live updates on each device

iPhone

1. In Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services, make sure the service is on at the system level.
2. Scroll to your browser, tap it, and select While Using the App with Precise Location turned on. Without precise mode iOS feeds the browser a deliberately fuzzed coordinate that does not update as you move.
3. Come back, tap Start live tracking, and choose Allow While Using App on the permission prompt.
4. Keep the tab in the foreground — iOS pauses the GPS stream to background tabs to save battery.

Android

1. In Settings → Location, switch Location on, then open Location services and make sure Google Location Accuracy is on (it adds Wi-Fi and cell positioning to GPS). Android 9 and older call this the High accuracy mode.
2. In Chrome, tap the address-bar lock icon → Permissions → Location → Allow.
3. Tap Start live tracking. On Android 12 and later, the prompt asks you to choose between precise and approximate — choose precise; approximate will not update meaningfully as you walk.
4. Like iOS, Android throttles GPS to background tabs; keep this one focused while tracking.

Desktop or laptop

1. Click Start live tracking and allow the permission prompt under the address bar.
2. Expect slow, infrequent updates. Most laptops have no GPS chip, so the browser falls back to Wi-Fi positioning, which only changes when you move between buildings or float between access points.
3. If you need crisp updates while moving, open this page on your phone instead. Neither macOS nor Windows passes a phone’s GPS fix through to a laptop browser, so a laptop will only ever see Wi-Fi or IP positioning.

Real-time location accuracy and battery

High-accuracy live tracking is the most expensive geolocation mode a browser can run. It keeps the GPS radio warm, the Wi-Fi scanner active, and the application processor awake to deliver each callback. How much battery that costs depends on the phone, the signal, and above all whether the screen stays on, so the honest way to know is to note your battery percentage before and after a ten-minute session. It matters on a long road trip and barely registers on a short walk. The widget above releases all of those handles the instant you tap Stop tracking, and disconnects them automatically if you navigate away from this page.

There is also a sneakier tradeoff: jitter. A static one-shot reading hides the natural noise in any GPS fix, because you only see the final smoothed coordinate. Live tracking exposes the noise — you watch the dot wander a few meters as the chip recomputes. That is not the tool being wrong; it is the GPS being honest. (If the dot sits in the wrong city entirely, the browser has probably fallen back to IP location; see why GPS and IP disagree.) If you need a single clean reading, our one-shot My Location page is the better fit. If you want to explore the area around your position with satellite imagery or switch between map styles, the interactive map gives you a larger, freeform canvas.

Keep the screen awake while tracking

Phones pause location updates to a web page once the screen turns off, so a walk with the phone in your pocket can leave long gaps in the path. Tick Keep screen on next to the start button and the page asks the browser for a screen wake lock (the Screen Wake Lock API), which stops the display from sleeping while tracking is running.

The lock is released the moment you stop tracking or untick the box. If you switch to another app the browser drops it automatically, and the page asks for it again when you come back. If your browser does not support wake locks, the option is simply not shown. Battery-saver modes can also refuse the request; tracking still works, but the screen may sleep.

When the live feed lags or freezes

If the update counter stops climbing or the timestamp goes stale, one of these is usually the cause:

• Tab moved to the background. Both iOS and Android pause the GPS stream to inactive tabs. Bring this page back to the foreground.
• Indoor signal loss. Walking from a parking lot into a steel-framed building can drop GPS within seconds; the OS waits to see if the signal returns before falling back to Wi-Fi.
• Screen went to sleep. A dark screen pauses the stream on most phones. Tick Keep screen on before you start, as described above.
• Battery-saver kicked in. Low-power modes downsample GPS or block the radio entirely while the screen is dim. Disable battery saver for the session.
• Browser denied background permission. Some browsers stop firing the watch callback after a few minutes if they decide the page is idle. Close and re-open the tab to restart the stream.
• No movement. If you are sitting still, the OS may legitimately have nothing new to report. The last fix on screen is still your current position.

If tracking never starts at all, work through the location not working fix guide.

Share your live location (WhatsApp, Google Maps)

This page only ever shows your own position to you. It cannot create a link for someone else to follow, because that would mean sending your coordinates to a server, which this site deliberately never does. To share a moving position with someone you trust, use an app built for it:

1. Google Maps: tap your profile picture → Location sharing → New share, choose how long, then pick a contact.
2. Apple Find My or Messages: in a conversation, tap the contact’s name → Share My Location, then choose one hour, until the end of the day, or indefinitely.
3. WhatsApp: in a chat, tap the attachment button → Location → Share live location, then choose 15 minutes, 1 hour, or 8 hours.

All three let you stop sharing early. To show someone a route after the fact instead, download it as a GPX file above and send the file. Before you share, readhow to share your GPS location safely.

GPS tracking of someone else’s phone

No website can find another phone’s live location from a number or a name: the position only leaves a phone when its owner shares it. For family members, the owner turns on sharing once with one of the three apps above, and you then follow them on your own map. For a lost or stolen phone of your own, sign in to Google Find My Device (Android) or Apple Find My (iPhone) on any browser. Tracking someone’s phone without their consent, including with hidden tracking apps, is a crime in many countries.

Privacy: the stream stays with you

Live tracking sounds invasive, but the data path is no different from a single-shot reading — there are just more readings. Every coordinate is delivered to JavaScript inside your own tab; none of them are posted to a server we control, written to any database, or correlated with anything else about your session. The page makes one throttled network call per ten seconds (at most) to translate the latest coordinate into a readable place name, and that request contains nothing but two numbers. A downloaded GPX file stays on your device unless you choose to send it to someone.

If you want to dig further into what a browser is — and is not — allowed to do with your GPS, our guide to the W3C Geolocation API walks through the permission model and the difference between getCurrentPosition and watchPosition in plain English.