Track Your Family on a Map Using Smartphone Apps

Rich DeMuro takes a look at several location sharing options for families using iOS and Android smartphones.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
I'm richdmuro and this is rich on Tech Daily. It's
one of the most popular questions I get. How do
I track my family members on a map? Well, parents
want that peace of mind of seeing where their kids are.
Plus there's lots of ways to do this because basically,
we're all carrying a GPS tracking device with us every
single day, and that is our cell phone. So let
me run down some of the apps that can do this.

(00:25):
The biggest and most popular family locator app out there
is called Life three sixty and what's great about this
is that it's built with this specific location sharing for
families and friends in mind. They say they handle more
than a billion location requests every single day. This is
the most full featured app of the bunch, and it
works for iOS and Android. So you do have to

(00:47):
create a new account, but once you do that, you
can add friends and family to your circle and when
you open the app, you're going to see the last
location of everyone in your circle, and this is something
I love. You also see the remaining battery percentage, right
gus the current battery percentage on their phone, so that's
really nice. You can also see a history of where
someone's been and you can get alerts if they leave

(01:08):
or arrive a location you specify, like school or work.
Plus you can set a radius, so if your kids
at school, you can say, look, if they wander a
thousand feet away from school, I'll get an alert. So
all the basic functionality of Life three sixty is free.
But keep in mind this is a business. They do
have to make money, so they are going to push
you to that paid subscription that runs about three dollars

(01:29):
a month, and that's going to give you extended location history,
which is thirty days of location plus unlimited alerts. So
this is probably the app i'd start with. Just keep
in mind that eventually you're probably gonna succumb to that
subscription fee and pay for that because you want to
get that extra functionality, but you don't have to you
to use it all right. Next up, Find my Friends.
This is a basic location sharing app that's built right

(01:52):
into the iPhone. If you search on your iPhone for
an app called Find my Friends, you're gonna find it.
It's basically like find my iPhone, but instead of locating
your devices, you get to see your family or friends
on a map. The biggest downside of this app is
that it only works with iOS, so before you kind
of sign up with this, you have to make sure
that everyone in your circle has an iPhone or some

(02:14):
sort of iOS device, but you probably want it to
be an iPhone because it's got that cellular connection. Now,
this app is pretty bare bones, but it does everything
you need. Once you have people in your group, you
can see their location on a map, and you can
share your location in several ways, always or just when
you want to send or request your current location so
someone can say, hey, can I see where you are
right now? You get a little bit of notification on

(02:35):
your phone, you approve it send your location. There's also
a functionality to send a notification when you leave or
arrive somewhere, and this can be one time or recurring.
So let's say you want a notification every time your
kid arrives to school. You can set that up and
get that every single day. And that's pretty cool. So
there's Find my Friends on iOS now. Next up is
basically Google's version of Find my Friends. It's called Google

(02:59):
Trusted con but this works on iPhone and Android, and
this is sort of Google's solution to location sharing, but
it has some other features built in The main thing
here is that you can sign up pretty easily if
you already have a Google account or a Gmail account,
so that way you don't have to keep track of
another password. You can download the app for iPhone or Android.
Then you sign in and you invite some other folks

(03:20):
that you want to exchange your location with. Then you
can choose from several levels of sharing. So there's a
basic level that just shows you if a member has
been online recently, and then you can go all the
way up to always sharing, which is really cool because
once you set this up, anytime you open up Google Maps,
you can see exactly where your friends are right on
the map, which is kind of fun. And you kind

(03:42):
of set this one and forget about it. You don't
really need to think about it much, and that's it.
Once it's set up, it's done. And if you're all
about Google, I think you're really gonna like this one. Now.
There's also another functionality of Google Trusted Contacts where you
can send a message out to all of the people
in your circle. If you feel onsafe, this will send
your real time location for a specified amount of time.
So how to use this. Let's say you're walking home

(04:04):
late at night and you just want you know, your
loved one, or maybe you're taking an uber home. Whatever
it is, you say, hey, let me alert my friends.
They're gonna get a message that says, hey, your friend
has alerted you. Here's a real time location and you
can sort of track them until they're home safely. So
the main thing about these apps, you're probably wondering, how
is this going to impact my battery? So all these

(04:24):
apps are pretty optimized so that they take advantage of
location services in the background, so they're not going to
straight up drain your battery. But if you're doing a
lot of real time sharing, that's when you're gonna find
the biggest impact on your battery percentage. So but otherwise, yeah,
these apps, I mean, like Life three sixty, they built
their business upon this. If every time you know, someone

(04:46):
installed this app it was just straight up draining their battery,
they would not have a very good business. So believe me,
the battery functionality is front and center. Thanks so much
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(05:06):
it outside the rich on techies. Thanks so much for listening.
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