Every feature, explained

You create a circle called "Family," share the 6-character invite code with your partner and two kids, and now all four of you show up on the same live map.

A circle is just a group of accounts linked by an invite code. Location, chat, places, and alerts are all scoped to a circle — nothing in one circle is visible from another. You can belong to more than one circle at once (e.g., "Family" and "Roommates"), and each stays completely separate.

1. Click the circle name at the top of your dashboard to open the switcher.
2. To start a new one: the "+" button next to it, then "I'm starting fresh."
3. To join one instead: "Someone invited me," then enter the 6-character code they gave you.
4. As the circle's owner, click the circle name again any time to see and share its invite code.

Your teenager's speeding alerts are firing constantly during their driving-school phase and drowning out everything else — mute just them, not the whole circle.

Muting is per-member, per-circle, and only affects notification sound/badges for you — the muted person still shows on the map and their activity still appears in the feed, just quietly. Removing someone is different: only a circle owner can do it, and it ends their access to that circle's map, chat, and history entirely.

1. Open the People tab in your circle.
2. Tap a member's row, then the mute icon to toggle it for just them.
3. Owners see a "Remove" option in the same place for taking someone out of the circle.

You glance at the dashboard and see your partner's pin near the grocery store and your kid's pin at school — no texting "where are you" required.

While location sharing is on, your browser (or the Android app) reports your position roughly every 15 seconds. Everyone in your circle sees that position update live on their own map. Tap any pin to recenter the map on that person.

1. Allow location access when your browser asks (or in the Android app's permission screens).
2. Sharing starts automatically once allowed — no separate "go live" step.
3. Tap a member's pin, or their row in the People list, to jump the map to them.

Rather than "last seen 2 minutes ago," you see "At Home" because they're inside a saved place, or "Driving · 58 km/h" because their last few pings show highway-speed movement.

PinUs looks at three things together: whether the person is currently inside one of your saved places, how their last several GPS pings are moving (stationary vs. walking-pace vs. driving-pace), and the weather at their current location (via Open-Meteo). It refreshes every 15 seconds while you have their popup open.

1. Tap any member's pin to open their popup — the status line updates automatically.
2. Save places (Home, Work, School) to unlock the "At [Place]" version instead of just a movement guess.

You save "School" with a 150-meter radius. The moment your child's pin enters that circle, everyone in the family circle gets an "arrived at School" activity entry.

Each place is a center point plus a radius. Every time a location ping comes in, PinUs checks whether the person just crossed that radius boundary (in either direction) and logs a one-time "arrived" or "left" alert — not a repeated notification for as long as they stay there.

1. Open the Places tab and tap "Add a place."
2. Search for the address or drop a pin, then set a radius that comfortably covers the location without overlapping a neighbor.
3. Give it a clear name — this is what shows up in every arrival/departure alert.

School ends at 3:15pm. You set a schedule: "alert me if [child] hasn't arrived at School by 3:30pm" on weekdays — silence if they're on time, a clear alert if they're not.

Unlike a plain arrival alert (which only fires when someone *does* arrive), this is checked once per day, per schedule — if the deadline passes and no "arrived" event was logged for that place and person, it fires a "late" alert instead.

1. Open a saved place, then "Add arrival schedule."
2. Pick who it applies to, which days of the week, and the deadline time.
3. Nothing else to do — it evaluates itself automatically each day.

You left Work and arrived at Home 22 minutes later. Instead of a plain arrival line, the activity feed shows "🚗 arrived at Home from Work — 14.2 km · 22 min · top 78 km/h."

A "trip" is the span between a "left" alert and the next "arrived" alert for the same person. PinUs sums the distance between every GPS ping recorded during that window (the actual path taken, not a straight line) and finds the fastest reliable speed reading along the way. Very short hops (under ~300m or 2 minutes) aren't summarized — that's usually just GPS wobble at a place's edge, not a real trip.

1. Nothing to set up — it happens automatically for any trip between two saved places.
2. Just glance at the Activity tab after someone arrives somewhere.

Your teenager's pings show sustained highway speed well past your circle's threshold — you get a single "was going about 132 km/h" alert, not a stream of them for as long as they're speeding.

Speed is estimated from the distance and time between two consecutive, high-accuracy GPS pings — not a speedometer reading. It only fires once per continuous episode (the moment someone crosses the threshold), and only when both readings are precise enough to trust, to avoid a false alert from GPS noise.

1. Nothing to set up — it's always on for every member sharing location.
2. It shows in the Activity tab like any other alert.

Your partner's phone is about to die on their commute home — the circle sees "🔋 [name]'s phone is at 18% battery" before it goes dark and their pin stops updating.

The Android app reads the phone's actual battery percentage on every location update and reports it alongside the location ping. It fires once on the drop below 20%, and can fire again after a full recharge takes the phone back out of that state.

1. Nothing to set up — automatic for anyone using the Android app.

Something's wrong and you need your circles to know right now — tap SOS, and everyone gets an alert regardless of whether they'd normally have your notifications muted.

Unlike every other alert type, SOS deliberately ignores each circle's mute and "sound off" preferences — an emergency isn't routine activity that should be silenced by a setting someone set for convenience. It sends to every circle you belong to at once, not just your currently active one.

1. Account settings → Security tab → "Send SOS to my circles."
2. It fires immediately on tap — there's no confirmation step, by design, for a genuine emergency.

"Running 10 min late, traffic on the bridge" — sent straight to the same people already looking at your location, without switching to a texting app.

Messages support bold, italic, and a glow effect, plus emoji, but deliberately no links or file attachments — kept simple and focused on quick circle communication rather than becoming a general messaging app. Messages (and their emoji reactions) are automatically deleted after 7 days.

1. Open the Chat tab in your circle.
2. Type and send like any messaging app; use the formatting buttons for bold/italic/glow.
3. Tap-and-hold (or the reaction icon) to react with an emoji; you can delete your own messages any time.

A glance at the Activity tab tells you your partner arrived home 20 minutes ago, your teen was flagged for speeding this morning, and nothing else needs your attention.

Every alert type described on this page (arrivals, departures, arrival schedules, speeding, battery, SOS, trip summaries) lands in this same feed, newest first. Entries older than 7 days are cleaned up automatically.

1. Open the Activity tab any time — nothing to configure.
2. Toggle sound on/off for this circle from the same tab if alerts are too noisy (SOS still always sounds regardless).

You're meeting a friend who isn't in your circle — generate a 3-hour share link and text it to them so they can watch you en route, without inviting them into your whole family circle.

The link is a long, unguessable token, not tied to a login — anyone with the link can view your live position on a simple map page for as long as the link is active. You choose the duration up front (1, 3, 8, or 24 hours), and it stops working automatically after that.

1. Account settings → Security tab → "Share my location."
2. Pick a duration and copy the generated link to send however you like.
3. You can stop it early from the same place if you no longer want it active.

You want your circle to see you during the day but not track your late-night movements — set a schedule so you're only visible 8am-8pm, hidden the rest of the time.

The plain "Invisible" toggle is an always-on/off switch — turn it on and your pin disappears from the map completely (you still show in the People list). The schedule is a separate, more granular option: pick days and a time range, and you're visible only inside that window, hidden outside it. The plain toggle always wins if both are set — it means "hide me, full stop."

1. Account settings → Security tab.
2. Toggle "Invisible on the map" for the simple always-hidden option.
3. Or toggle "Only be visible on a schedule" just below it, then pick your days and time range.

Zoomed in on your kid's route home, you turn on bus stops to see which one they should be walking to — or, in an emergency, turn on police stations to see the nearest one instantly.

Transit and emergency-service overlays pull live data from OpenStreetMap for whatever's currently in view, only once you're zoomed in close enough — they don't load at a city-wide zoom level. Weather (rain/snow) is a purely visual effect layered over the map based on the currently-selected member's local weather, sourced from Open-Meteo.

1. Account settings → Security tab (regular dashboard) or the settings gear (merchant dashboard).
2. Toggle "Show bus, MRT & LRT stops," and separately, "Show police stations" / "Show hospitals" / "Show fire stations" — all off by default.
3. Weather effects appear automatically when relevant — nothing to turn on.

You spot a waving pin near your kid's school on the map — it's a bakery with a "20% off first visit" listing, visible to you the same way any merchant listing is to any logged-in user.

Any regular, logged-in user sees merchant listings that have been approved by the site's admin and haven't expired — this isn't tied to which circle you're in, since businesses aren't circle-specific. Tapping a listing's icon shows its description, address, and any must-try or discount info the business added.

1. Nothing to set up — listings just appear on your map automatically as you browse it.
2. Tap a business's icon to see its details.

At the end of the month, PinUs Wrapped shows your family collectively covered 340 km, spent the most time at "Home" (unsurprisingly), and kept a chat streak going for 12 days.

Distance is calculated from your full location history (not subject to the 7-day activity retention). Most-visited place is reconstructed from raw GPS pings against your saved places. Chat streak is honestly limited by chat's 7-day message retention, and labeled as such rather than overstating what it can actually measure.

1. Account settings → look for "Your PinUs Wrapped" and pick a period (month or year).

A Spanish-speaking family member visiting pinus.live sees the marketing page in Español instead of English, switched from the globe icon in the top navigation.

Your language choice is saved in a cookie for a year, so it's remembered on your next visit. Two of the 19 are right-to-left (Arabic and Urdu), which flips the page layout direction automatically.

1. Click the globe icon in the top navigation on the homepage.
2. Pick your language from the two-column list.

You change your pin color so you're easier to tell apart from another family member with a similar name, or update your password after using PinUs on a shared computer.

Most account settings apply instantly and don't require any confirmation. Deleting your account is the one exception — it requires re-entering your password to confirm, since it's permanent: your location history, messages, and circle memberships are all removed. If you're the sole owner of a circle with other members still in it, ownership passes to whoever's been in the circle longest rather than deleting it out from under everyone else.

1. Account settings (top of the dashboard) for name, color, avatar, and password.
2. Security tab, "Delete my account," for permanent deletion — you'll be asked for your password to confirm.