With a group chat that actually belongs there — not bolted on beside it.
A Space is everyone who can see you here. You can be in several, and none of them can tell the others exist.
Home, the gym, school. The Space owns them, so they outlast whoever typed the name.
It lands in the thread carrying the time it actually happened — even when the phone reported late. It sits in scrollback, and you can reply to it.
Pause and nothing is collected — and everyone sees that you paused, and when. No invisible off switch, because an app that lets you fake it is an app nobody can trust.
Your family sees you. We don't sell where you were, because we never built the part that would.
Most apps have two: a dot, or no dot. That collapses “she's driving”, “her phone died” and “she turned it off” into the same silence — so you learn to distrust all three. Ping draws them apart.
A live fix frames the street. An older one frames the neighbourhood. Precise-off frames the whole area and never street level, because a map framed on one street is making the claim that they're on it. The zoom is part of what the map is saying, so it only says what it knows.
Pins survive the photograph. Over imagery they take a shadow treatment and their labels go fully opaque, so nothing is lost against water, tarmac or a pale car park.
Not just a dot — the neighbourhood or street named in plain language, so a glance is enough. Battery and the age of the fix sit right beside it.
Name that point and keep it as a Place, or just get directions to it. The map is somewhere you can put things, not only read them.
How long it takes to reach them, then a hand-off to Apple Maps or Waze — and if you ride, Waze is asked for a motorcycle route rather than a car's.
Your Spaces are cached, so launching without signal gives you the circle and its last-known state instead of an empty screen.
A trail with the stops picked out, drawn on the map you're already reading rather than in a second screen you have to go and find.
Not a tab beside the map. One thread per Space, with everything you'd expect from a messaging app — which is exactly why an arrival can simply be a message in it.
The whole grammar of a chat app, so nobody is left guessing whether the message about running late ever arrived.
Stamped with the true crossing time, not when the server noticed. The Place name travels; the coordinates never do.
You can message anyone you share a Space with. Leave that Space and the thread neither disappears nor stays open — it freezes, read-only. Share a Space again and it thaws, with every message still in it.
Home, the gym, school — named together and kept by the Space. A Place outlives whoever created it, and is never evaluated against anyone outside the circle.
Both are real events with their own thresholds: staying a while means an arrival, several fixes away means a departure. Loitering on the edge posts nothing at all.
It's the only decision you make when you create a Place, and it's a real trade-off. Drag it — the map zooms with the circle, so you can watch a Place stop being a house and start being a district.
A fix vaguer than 150 m decides nothing here — Ping would rather stay quiet than guess.
Not a separate history screen you'd have to go and find. The trail lays over the same map, with the stops picked out — because “she was at the gym for an hour” is the useful fact, and a line of raw dots isn't.
History has a floor and a ceiling, and neither is a setting anyone can quietly move. Pick a day.
A normal day: five stops, and the way between them.
Satellite view contains every colour at once, and it ignores light and dark mode entirely. Rather than invent a second palette for it — which would spend the one-meaning-per-hue rule that makes the colours worth having — the pin carries its own treatment.
A tight shadow separates the shape from a busy background, and a wider soft one stops that reading as a hard ring over flat areas like water or tarmac. It's applied on street too, at about half strength.
Captions drop their translucency over imagery. At 85% the photograph showed through the text, and a caption's only job is to be read. Same colours, same dots, same wording — the map style never changes what a pin means.
There is no mechanism anywhere in Ping for adding a person to a circle without them agreeing to it. Not a setting that's on by default — a step that cannot be skipped.
Invites travel however you already talk — messages, whatever you like. No address book upload, and Ping never asks for your contacts.
Tap it without the app and you land in the App Store; the invite is still waiting when you open Ping. A short code covers the case where the link gets lost on the way.
A screen that names the Space and the people in it, and asks. Decline and nothing happens. Joining is the moment your sharing starts — never before it.
A Space keeps five Places. Go past it and the extra ones don't vanish — they go dormant: name, radius and history intact, simply not watched until there's room again. The same holds if limits ever tighten around you.
And it's the newest Places that go quiet, never the oldest — so tightening a plan can freeze “Courts”, but it can't freeze “Home”.
Every one of these is a decision made once, in the architecture, so it can't quietly become a setting later.
A published ceiling on how long any location point is kept — not a preference we can raise. And your history starts the day you joined a Space, so nobody who adds you gets your past along with your present.
Ping is one person's work, funded by nobody. That shapes the order things arrive in — so here is the order, with the part that is already built marked as built rather than implied.
Circles that cannot see one another, invites nobody can skip, and membership that starts the moment you accept — never before it.
Named together, kept by the circle. Arrivals and departures with their own thresholds, stamped with the time they actually happened.
Delivered, read, typing and unread. One thread per Space, plus 1:1 threads that freeze read-only when you stop sharing a Space and thaw with their history intact.
Live, stale, paused, low battery, approximate, hidden here, not sharing, offline. Pause collects nothing and everyone can see that you paused.
A trip with a destination on the lock screen, and a notice to the traveller when it ends rather than a card that silently disappears.
Granted by Apple and working: an SOS reaches you through Do Not Disturb, through the silent switch, and on a locked phone.
The trail with stops picked out, seven days of history, and every location point deleted at thirty — enforced on the server's own clock.
The review pass and the last of the field testing. Not built yet, and the honest blocker is that some of it can only be proven by driving around.
The figure Ping could quote today was taken on a build iOS kept killing in the background, which makes it meaningless. It is being measured again rather than published.
The paid tier the limits were designed around. It does not exist yet, and nothing is charged until it does.
Leaving should not mean losing what was yours. Not built.
Two people in one room should not have to spell six characters at each other.
The app has never been driven at accessibility text sizes. Until it has, Ping is not going to claim it works there.
A full port, planned in fifteen slices and deliberately behind the iPhone launch. Nothing has been written.
Ping goes blind exactly where people most want it to work. The shape of the fix is still an open question.
A shake, or a button that isn't on a screen — because holding a big red button is impossible in the moment it is for.
Cars in a convoy that can see each other as a group rather than as scattered pins.
Rather than on a server, for as long as a phone can hold it.
No dates, on purpose. A roadmap with dates on it from a project this size is a work of fiction — and “built, next, wanted” is the version that can still be true in a month. Everything above the “you are here” line is running on a phone today; nothing below it is.
Ping is for partners, roommates, close friends and adult families. 18 and over, everywhere.
In development