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Ultimate iPhone Driving App Easily Shares Your ETA

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Texting and driving is illegal in most states, but what if you need to tell someone your ETA based on your location? Thankfully, there’s an app for that.

OMW is an app available on iPhone, and it received a generous update this week, allowing users to set favorite destinations and keep recent destinations near the top, that way you only need to tap a couple of times before sending your ETA.

So what is OMW? It’s an app that can give a friend or family member your location with just a quick tap, and it sends the information by text message. From there, the recipient can click the link in the message that opens up a window in their mobile web browser with your location.

Things go a step further, though, and you determine a destination so that you can tell someone your ETA. That will give the recipient not only your location, but how long it will take you to get there and what time you’ll arrive, all updated in real-time.

What makes OMW better than other ETA apps that have been on the market for a while? Let’s go over some details.

On My Way!

Before I discovered OMW, I was using Glympse as my ETA app and even featured it in our Best Travel Apps for iPhone roundup. It’s been a good app to me, but I always felt like the set up process to share my ETA to a destination took way too many steps, and the clunky user interface made it a lot slower to do.

OMW, on the other hand, sports a simple design that’s dead-easy to navigate, and sharing your location is a lot quicker than doing the same on Glympse. For some reason, while Glympse has fully updated for iOS 7, the design of the app still feels like it’s in the iOS 6 days, while OMW looks extremely modern and sleek.

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As soon as you launch OMW, you’ll be greeted with a map of your current location and a single button that says Add Destination. Tapping on that will bring you to a search field where you’ll type in your destination — either the address or the name of the place.

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Tap on the result you want from the list that pops up. You’ll then be taken to a screen where you can simply just tap Share Location and send it via text message to a friend. Once you send it off, you’ll be taken back to that same screen where you’ll have other options to choose from.

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For instance, you can get directions to your destination my tapping on the ellipses and selecting your map app of choice (if you have more than one installed). Directions are something that OMW doesn’t offer natively, and that’s one thing that Glympse conveniently has, but chances are, you already know how to get there if it’s a local place.

Furthermore, you can tap on the star icon to set that destination as a favorite, that way you don’t have to search for it again in the future. This is especially convenient if the destination is a regular place you visit weekly with friends or family.

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As far as what the recipient sees when they tap on the link sent to them in a text message, they’ll see the same screen that you see on your iPhone, with a map of your location, along with the ETA and the distance left in the trip at the top. Again, this information is updated in real-time.

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This is what the recipient sees when they tap on the link in the text message.

Where OMW Falls Short

There’s not much to complain about with OMW; it’s a dead-simple app that does the job well. While Glympse can be a bit overwhelming, it does include a diverse feature set that OMW doesn’t have, including built-in directions, and more-thorough ETA info, including your speed in MPH.

Glympse can also just simply share your location, without any destination, that way friends and family can see where you’re waiting at, whether it’s at the mall or at a gas station.

These features are great and all, but I would much rather prefer a stripped-down version of Glympse that’s easy to use and isn’t a hassle. This is where OMW shines. Once I get a favorite destination set up, it literally takes five seconds to send my ETA through OMW.

1 Comment

1 Comment

  1. Manish Maheshwari

    12/11/2014 at 1:32 am

    How about not even touching the app when it is event time. https://vent.am

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