Who knows what Apple’s app designers were thinking when they crafted Find My Friends to look like a leather glove, complete with stitching.
With the arrival of iOS 7, all of the core apps (and most of the optional ones) got a much-ballyhooed “flat” redesign — except for Find My Friends. It remained, to many, the ugly odd-app-out.
Well, today it’s ugly no more. Apple just pushed out Find My Friends 3.0, which has no major new features but an entirely new appearance. The orange-hued icon meshes well with other iOS 7 apps, while the app itself carries the iOS 7 look and feel across all corners.
In case you’re unfamiliar with it, Find My Friends helps you locate friends and family members on a map. You can also share your own location, either permanently or temporarily. Best of all, the app offers location-based alerts. It can notify you when, say, a child gets home from school or a friend’s flight gets in.
Now, when you view a friend’s location on the map, you can see a small pop-up of their profile photo (if they have one), helpful if you have several friends clustered together. The app also displays three handy menu options: Contact, Notify Me, and More.
Find My Friends remains a free app, and, to my thinking, one of the best tools in the iOS arsenal. Now it looks like it belongs there, too.