iOS 27's Find My Changes: What They Mean for Hiking

iOS 27 lets you hide your location from one person in Find My, with no notification sent. Here's exactly what Apple documents, what's still unclear, and what it means for a hike.

By TrailsPals · Source-based guide. How we prepare our guides · Suggest a correction

Apple shipped a real change to Find My in iOS 27, and it's already showing up in hiking and family-safety threads: you can now hide your location from one specific person without them finding out. If your family uses Find My to keep track of you on a hike, here's what actually changed, what Apple still won't tell you, and where it still falls short of a hike-specific tool.

What's new in Find My with iOS 27?

iOS 27 adds Hide Location: you can pause sharing with one specific person while staying visible to everyone else, with no equivalent control in the iOS 26 version of Find My. Apple's own guide doesn't say what that person sees, whether they're notified, or how long the pause lasts.

MacObserver found the feature by comparing Apple's published Find My guides side by side: "Hide Location... appears in the iOS 27 guide with no equivalent in the iOS 26 version of the same page." Before this, the only lever was the all-or-nothing "Share My Location" toggle — on for everyone you'd shared with, or off for everyone.

Does Hide Location tell the person you paused sharing with them?

No — and that's by design but also undocumented. MacObserver's review of Apple's own iOS 27 guide found no statement on whether the hidden contact is notified, what they see instead of your location, or how long a pause lasts, so don't rely on it working a specific way.

That matters for the exact situation a lot of people are actually in: wanting to quietly pause sharing with one anxious relative during a hike without starting a conversation about it. Apple not documenting the behavior means you're trusting an assumption, not a published guarantee — worth testing with a second device before you rely on it for anything that matters.

Can I already share my location for a set time instead of forever?

Yes — Find My has long supported sharing for an hour, until the end of the day, indefinitely, or a custom time period, on iOS 15 or later. That's not new in iOS 27, but it's the easiest way to stop a hike's location share from quietly running forever.

Apple's support guide spells out the duration options directly, and they're worth using deliberately for a hike: pick "until end of day" or a custom window that covers your hike plus a buffer, rather than "indefinitely" and then forgetting it's on weeks later.

What does Find My still not show you on a hike?

Find My shares a single, continuously updating position — not the route you walked, your pace, or anything recorded once the hike ends. It also needs the person watching to have an Apple device, which rules it out if the family member you want to reassure uses Android.

Both limits matter more on a trail than in a city. A dot with no route gives a worried family member no way to tell "stopped for lunch on the ridge" from "stopped moving and something's wrong." And a hiking family is rarely all-iPhone — see how live location sharing works across every option, Find My included for the full rundown of what each built-in tool covers and where it breaks.

Should hikers replace Find My with a hiking app?

Not necessarily — for a short, well-covered local hike among iPhone-owning family, Find My's new controls are a real improvement and cost nothing extra. Switch to a hiking app like TrailsPals when you want the route recorded, offline tracking, or a watcher who isn't on an iPhone.

That's the same split this blog has covered before for the check-in-versus-tracker question: match the tool to the actual hike and the actual family, not to whichever app is already installed. See a hiking check-in, not a family tracker for how TrailsPals' watch link compares to Apple's own Check In and to always-on trackers like Life360.

Hiding from one person, three ways

iOS 27's Hide Location is a genuine step toward the "share the journey, not a 24/7 feed" balance families actually want — it just comes from Apple with fewer guarantees about what the other person sees than a tool built around sending a specific link to a specific person. See how live location sharing works for how TrailsPals handles that instead, or read every way to share your live location while hiking for the full comparison, Find My included.