Zenly, the Snapchat app to see where your friends are, adds a list of who stays home the most

With the epidemic of COVID-19 spreading every day worldwide, it’s not the best time for applications like Zenly. This app, owned by Snapchat since 2017, is the spin-off of Snapchat’s Snap Map: shows where your friends are on the map.

With more and more regions under forced confinement, the ideal is for everyone to stay at home as long as possible. One way to boast about this is with Zenly, which in its latest update has included a sorting out which of your contacts have stayed at home the most. In addition, the application now includes a “Lense” with information about the coronavirus.

100% at home

Zenly is primarily a social application, whose main functionality is to see where your friends are in real time. In the current situation its usefulness is quite reduced, although it has found a way to remain relevant: a ranking on who’s most at home.

For better or worse, the application records the location of you – and your friends who use it – in real time, so over time it can calculate how much time you spend at home. And if you spend more time at home than usual, you can brag about it from the new Save lives, stay home.

Accessible from your profile, you don’t need to do anything to participate in the ranking… except stay at home. The application will try to calculate how long you’re home over time and will show a percentage to both you and the friends who have you in their contact list. The application needs to collect data, so you won’t see the percentage until some time after you start using it.

This isn’t Zenly’s only news regarding the coronavirus. The application has Lenses in its map, which would be the equivalent of Google Maps layers, and in the last update it has added a Lense for the coronavirus.

This Lense shows overprints on the map the confirmed cases of each country. When you play in a country, a window is displayed that also includes the people recovered. Considering that both Google and Apple are not allowing such applications in their app store, it is a curious and visual way to keep up with the more or less updated statistics.

One thing to keep in mind is that Zenly’s Android app is not adapted for the latest Android 10 restrictionsso you only get the location while using the application. On iPhone it’s no problem.

Zenly – Best Friends Only

Via | The Verge