Riding with friends on a live map

Last updated: 29 August 2026

A live map is the most useful thing a riding app can do and the easiest thing for it to get wrong. Useful, because you stop asking "where are you?" on a highway. Wrong, because a map of where somebody is, shown to the wrong person, is a genuinely dangerous thing.

So here is exactly who can see what.

The map is friends only. Always.

Your position on the Motogram map is visible to riders you have connected with, and to nobody else. Not to strangers, not to people who searched your name, not to riders standing next to you.

There is no setting that makes you visible to everyone, because there is no good reason for one to exist.

Discover shows distance, never position

Discover is how riders find each other — it lists riders and how far away they are. How far, not where. A rider who has never connected with you learns that somebody with your name and photo is about seven kilometres away. That is enough to send a connect request and not enough to find you.

The distance is worked out on the server. Your coordinates are not sent to the other phone.

Switching it off deletes the position

Most apps have a sharing switch that stops updating your location and leaves the last one sitting there. That is a switch that lies.

In Motogram, turning location sharing off removes your position outright. You are not a stale pin on a map. You are not on the map at all. Turn it back on and a fresh position is published; nothing about the old one comes back.

Every pin says how old it is

This is the part most maps skip, and it is the part that makes a map honest.

A phone publishes its position while the app is open. So every pin on the map is a last known position, not a live one. Motogram prints the age on each pin — 20 minutes ago, Yesterday, 3 weeks ago — because a pin without an age is a claim about where somebody is standing right now, and that claim is usually false.

Positions older than thirty days are dropped. Not for freshness — a three-week-old pin is clearly labelled and still useful for "was he ever up there?" — but because a rider who uninstalled the app in March cannot take their pin down, and their old riding group should not still be looking at it.

What is stored

• One current position per rider, replaced each time it updates. There is no history, no track, and no route log.
• It is deleted when you switch sharing off, and when you delete your account.
• It is not sold, and it is not used for advertising. There are no ads in Motogram.

The full detail is in the privacy policy, and the deletion form removes everything, not just the map.

Using it on a ride

The map earns its place on a long group ride, where riders string out over twenty kilometres and nobody wants to stop to make a phone call. You can see who is behind, who has already reached the stop, and who has not moved for half an hour — which is the one worth acting on. See also planning a group ride and the SOS button.