Whether you have a habit of arriving awkwardly early or annoyingly late for meetings, a new app calledTwist is here to help. The location-based app, which launched on Wednesday, is akin to Find My Friends, but adds the useful element of notifying family, friends or colleagues when you’re going to arrive at a specific location.
The app offers a clean and simple way to accomplish multiple tasks: Track a person’s location, receive directions, share photos along your route, send messages, and get venue and weather details. It’s not the snazziest-looking app, but the uncluttered experience is actually refreshing in a world where apps are trying to stuff as much as they can into the iPhone’s 3.5-inch screen. (Twist is currently only available on iOS.)
The app is especially helpful for someone like myself, who tends to show up early (or at least on time) for social gatherings. I end up sending friends an embarrassing amount of texts along the lines of, “Where are you? When are you getting here? How far away are you now, specifically? What bus are you on?”, etc. (Yes, it’s that bad.) So, instead of bombarding my contacts with all these queries, they could simply use Twist to proactively keep me abreast of their whereabouts with push notifications, texts or emails — and thus be saved from my interrogations. Plus, I can track a friend’s exact location within the app.
Twist is just as useful for people who are always running late to meet-ups. Instead of having to call or text apologies while you’re already speed-walking to your appointment (or, worst yet, driving), Twist does the work for you. And even though Twist is iOS only, the app can still send location notifications to people via text or email.
You can put favorite destinations at the top of Twist’s clean-cut home screen (left). Even if your friends don’t have the app, it can still send them text message notifications (right). Image: Twist
In Twist, you start new journeys, aptly called “twists.” You create a new twist by simply entering in the address or name of the place you’re heading to, choosing the recipients you want to share the twist with, and picking your means of transport (driving, public transportation, walking or biking). You can also adjust whether you want your recipients to receive a departure notification, an arrival notification, location-tracking or all three. And you can also opt to share your twist to Facebook or Twitter.
Once you create a twist, the app will generate an estimate of how long it will take you to get to your destination. It also turns on its background location tracking, and will be able to know when you actually embark on your trip.
The app also sprinkles in extra goodies, like the ability to share photos in a specific twist and get access to Yelp reviews and Google Street views of your final destination. I imagine the photo-sharing feature could be fun when you’re on a longer driving trip. Everything you share within a twist is private, visible only to the recipients of the twist.
Overall, Twist is a very easy-to-use app with an incredibly relevant purpose. It’s one of the few location-based apps that is actually useful for people’s day-to-day lives — it’s not about people discovery or just broadcasting where you’ve been. Now all it needs is an Android and Windows Phone app to cover its bases.
