At some point personal/family emergency meant that instead of "regular" 1800km of both wife and myself driving across Europe - I was about to drive that on my own, all in one go/day. And then few days later back.

To ease her mind - I turned on family/emergency location sharing in Google Maps.

Afterward we realized it's supper convinient way to avoid those "How long before you (and one of kids that either one of us would pick up) are home?" calls.

Although starting shortly before Covid the functionality seems to have taken a nose dive. Like randomly showing one of us is in different city (e.g. Amsterdam vs Rotterdam), or now during Covid often saying "Offline, along with last known location from 1h ago (which tends to be home) and what was battery level at the time".

Actually it seems like some engineer (pre covid) though of optimizing refresh time for Google Maps location sharing based on how much it changes over some recent time.

And now combination of WFH meaning it's same place for majority of the day and that TTL being high, and literally all grocery stores we go to having no cellphone signal (I mean not even SMS can make it) putting us in edge of an edge case.