When our children are growing up, we are always worried about things, such as where they are playing, and whom they are meeting. Are they having a good time in school and is there anything that is bothering them?
These are some thoughts that always keep on lurking back in our heads when we are thinking about our child. But there is one more thing that worries us the most when our kid doesn’t return home on time.
That’s when the mind just explodes with all the negative thoughts. So to keep yourself, your kids, and your family members safe you need something which can help you track down your family members when they are coming late.
So in case, you need to pick them up or get some help. You know where they are. This will make your family confident. You can turn it off when you want.
There are a number of ways that can help you and your family in times of need. Given below are some of the best family tracking apps for both Android and Ios devices. You can download them on your smartphone and then say goodbye to late-night worries.
Best Family Tracking Apps – Our Top Pick
Given below is the list of family tracking apps that you can use daily to locate your kids when they are going to extra classes after their school and coming late. This will help you cope with the anxiety that all parents have.
We are not at all biased in any way. These apps have got their position due to the research that we have done on them along with the public reviews.
1. Life360 – Family Locator & GPS Tracker
Think about an app that is a complete package for being a family tracking app. You can have a chat group or personal message chats. With the family tracking app locator by Life 360, you can track all the people who matter most to you and know what they know in real-time.
It is merely life-changing and makes things easier for a parent to keep track of their kids when they venture out on their own.
You can use this app to create your private groups which you can use any time you want to know the location of the person who is present in that group.
You can also set to receive alerts when the member of your family group leaves or arrives at the destination, so you don’t have to look continuously at the screen and see if they have arrived at the location or not.
On the other hand, if somehow one of your family members has lost their phone or it gets stolen. You can track down the device and locate it yourself.
There are several features that you can enjoy on this application that are quite similar to the other apps which are used as family location apps.
The application uses real-time GPS locations to track the people from your family. You can only track those people who accepted your invitation to be a part of your group in the application.
As a result, the company works hard to keep the location private and shareable with the people with whom the person wants to share it.
There is a phone permission system that enables the developers to send a notification to the customer management to help you out on the road when you are driving. Customer care will guide you and tell you anything that will come your way.
These could be high traffic, a stoppage, a gas pump for you to refill, and tolls. To be able to use all the features that this family tracking app provides you only need to have internet access, and you are good to go.
With this app, you will stay connected to the people who matter most to you. When someone from the family is living in another country or state, you can use this app to know their whereabouts and know they are safely home.
This app will help you lower your anxiety about the people you love and care about the most. With this, you can create a private group which is called circles.
These groups could be of anyone, and it could be of your teammates from the office, your family member, etc. the choice is yours. The company lets you do whatever you want with this app.
With this app, you can add people to the circle and view their real-time location on a map. Where they are and what they are doing. Which street they are walking on, in which bar they are having drinks.
This will help you locate them if there comes a need in which you have to go and pick them up from that place. You can track down the person from the private family map, which can only be viewed by those in that group. Thus you don’t have to worry about sending them messages such as “where are you?”
You can track multiple people simultaneously on the same map, so you don’t have to go to and fro between two different apps.
With this, you don’t have to send multiple messages to stay connected and in coordination with your family. The family locator uses GPS to locate your family member and send you their liver location on your phone.
On the other hand, if you are planning to meet with your family and friends and someone from it is getting late, all of the people in the group will get a notification about the latecomer. Thus, giving you time to decide when to leave home, so you don’t have to wait for them in the restaurant.
For this app to work perfectly, you must have the internet working all the time. It is an excellent product if it’s the first time your child is venturing out on his own for a school trip. This will keep you calm and makes them feel confident about yourself.
2. Parental Control – Screen Time & Location Tracker
Second, we have one of the best family tracking apps. Screentime is the developer of this application. The main goal of the company is to make the world of smartphones a safe place for kids and teenagers.
The technology is impressive to use, to be honest, and as a child, we too want to get our new phones as soon as possible. But if you are not careful, this fight can easily ruin your child’s future.
The Internet is a place where you can easily find predators who are trying their best to get something from your kids. Be it money, or pictures which they can then use to blackmail them.
Thus, to keep parents happy and kids safe Screen Time has come up with this parental control app that controls the movement of their kids in the online world and tracks their geo-location when they are going outside the home.
As a parent, you always need to be one step ahead of your kids. It might be hard as we are not the most tech-savvy people. Children can easily fool us if they are little but smart.
A parent needs to know what their kids are doing and guide them at the appropriate time. The numbers are shocking even for a mobile application development company.
But the latest data from the company’s end showcased that a lot of kids are spending more than 7 hours daily on their phones, which is more than the healthy amount of usage that is 2 hours in a day.
They are not making any business deals or talking to their clients so why do they spend so much time on the internet? That’s the question we all need to ask. But as teenagers, you are not going to get a relevant answer. So the best thing you could do is get this app to download and see what they’ve been up to.
“Put your phone down,” this term is now more than common and gives birth to daily arguments. This leads parents to pester their kids to engage in real playtime activities rather than spending all their time in a virtual world.
Around 95% of the kids that have smartphones scroll through their social media feeds at night. More than 50% of the kids have said they can’t think of their day without their smartphones. Thus, making them addicted to its usage.
As a parent, there are things that you need to know and things that you should not know. The company has clarified that they don’t want to provide parents with spying applications.
So there are specific regulations that even if you are a parent, you need to accept from the application developers.
On the other hand, certain things which you need to keep your eye open for are, how many hours does your child watch his phone in a day? What applications are they using most and how many hours are they spending on each application?
You can see which apps your kids have downloaded and you can monitor if the app is good for them or needs to be removed from their phones.
Also, you need to keep track of the websites your kid is surfing through when browsing the internet. You have to check if the sites are appropriate and do not contain harmful content that can affect your kid in any way possible.
With the help of this application, you can set the time limits, so your kids don’t pass the excessive usage mark. You can use this to reward your kid with additional screen time once they complete a specific task such as their homework. Or get good marks in the exams.
You can even schedule a block time, meaning during this time the phone will be inactive, and your kid won’t be able to use it.
You can use it during time off school when they are going to sleep and doing their homework. This will help your kid to focus on what is more important to them.
Using web filtering features, you can now block the sites using particular keywords. This will help your kid to be on the safe side of the internet where people are sharing knowledge and having a great time.
3. FamiSafe Parental Control App & Location Tracker
At the third spot on our list, we have FamiSafe, and this app can’t run on both Ios and Android devices. In addition to these operating system support.
You can also run this app on Kindle as not many parents want their kids to have a phone early. With the help of the FamiSafe family tracking app, you can see the device activity, browser history of your kid, and which app they are using on their phone.
You don’t know what they are doing live. But you can check out the search history of their browser.
In addition to this, you can use it to block certain websites, and web pages that you think are not appropriate for your kids.
By using filtering and blocking, which is inbuilt in this app, you can eliminate unnecessary applications and websites that could potentially hurt your kids’ privacy.
Some of these applications are Kik and WeChat. These applications have lots of adult content, and as a teenager, it could potentially harm your child.
Also, some apps and web pages have special cookies that will keep track of you while hiding themselves. So it is better to stay away from those websites and browse the internet safely.
We do not know what your kids are doing and where they are can actually lead to trigger your anxiety, and that happens a lot. As a parent, we can say we have faced the same issue.
It is not possible for you to always stay by their side. You need to give them personal space for them to grow individually as a human and have their sense of things that they see around them. Famisafe is one of the most reliable parental apps that you can find on the app store right now in 2020.
Even though it’s the year of the pandemic and kids are staying inside their homes most of the time. As a result, they are spending more time on the internet and browsing it when they are free.
We can’t stop them from browsing and looking at funny videos on YouTube. But to keep an eye on their usage and history is an important thing. With the help of FamiSafe, you can do it, without making it too obvious.
Likewise, you can see the app’s history, like which videos and keywords your kids are using each day without having to get physical access to their phones. With the help of this app on your phone, you can view a timeline of your child’s activity.
You can even see which game they played and for how long. Many parents have already lost quite a lot of money during this lockdown as their kids spent a huge amount on an online game through microtransactions.
Thus, it is better to keep a lookout for what they are playing and for how long. Playing online games is not an issue. Everybody likes to play with their friends in a virtual world where you are free to do anything. But the main concern is the usage of money.
Lastly, you can check the number of apps that have been uninstalled from your kid’s device. This way, you can see if they are trying to hide something.
Some games that you asked them not to play but still the night they play and uninstall it in the morning. The games save data online, so all the progress saves in the cloud. Your kid can resume his gameplay from where he left off once he reinstalls the game.
4. MMGuardian Parental Control App For Parent Phone
“Protection for kids, Peace of mind for parents.” That’s the company’s motto; MMGuardian has one of the most robust mobile application platforms to monitor your kid’s activities.
You can have as much as precise control over small things that are happening on your kid’s phone—thus providing complete safety to your kid from online, which is not so forgiving.
It might sound confusing to you, but you can use this app to read all the messages that come and go from your kid’s phone to the other person. But the company knows that you don’t want to be a spy in your kid’s life.
So the developers of the app have come up with a special AI-powered feature that sends you a notification if a particular word is used in the text which is sent over the phone to someone else other than you and your spouse.
These keywords can be anything, you are free to set them up, but most of them are related to drugs, sex, suicide, and bullying.
Furthermore, there are a number of times we have seen cases where teenagers have sent inappropriate photos to their friends or people they’ve been dating, and the results were never good.
So to keep your kid safe, you can use inappropriate picture detection which will send you a notification as soon as these images are found on your kid’s phone.
The application is available for both Android and Ios devices and parents don’t have to buy a phone which is running on the same operating system.
Thus, your kid can have an Ios phone while still, you can monitor them using your Android system if you have a choice and still waiting to give your kid his first phone.
The company says to go with the Android phone as it gives you better access to the whole platform.
You can set a daily limit on apps and permanently block them from your kid’s phone. This way, you can keep them out of the games that require microtransactions to level up.
On the other hand, this gives an excellent opportunity to bribe them to complete their homework first and then play the games they want to play. When you can set the unlocking time, you can lock the app remotely once your kid passes the time limit.
These are some of the uses which make the MM guardian app in the top 5 of our list of best family tracking apps.
5. Geozilla – Find My Family
What if you don’t want to give a phone to your kid as they are quite young for it, but you need to track them? What if the school is too far away from home and you want to ensure that you know what they are doing and where they are at any moment? 🤔
Well, for that Geozilla is your go-to device. It is a pocket-size tracker that will send you the location signals of the person who has the device with them.
The Godzilla uses both the GPS and GSM network to give you the location of the person whom you want to track. With three small LEDs in the front, you get to know the power and connection status. You can charge the device using a USB port that is on the other side of the device.
The tracker device costs $49.99, but it is much cheaper than a phone, and it is safer for your kids to use it than a mobile phone.
Once the tracker is on, you can find it by putting the initials on the app, which is installed on your smartphone. You can go for $5 for a month, or you can get the annual package which is $50.
The company doesn’t pressure you to choose the annual plan and both plans works in the same way. You can set the alert system which will send you notifications on your phone automatically every 30 mins. This way, you don’t have to continuously look at your screen to know what your kid is doing and where he is going.
If you charge the device for five minutes, it can last for a day. So it’s a quick charge and technology. The combined cost of annual usage is $100, which is nothing, to be honest when you see the costs of the mobile phones that you have to buy to stay connected with your child. Also, mobile phones, as we all know, are not good for children.
The physical device has an SOS button to be used in times of emergency. Not only can you use it for your kids, but you can use it even for your pets, cars, and other things that you want to track daily.
6. Family Locator – GPS Tracker & Find Your Phone App
The company Sygic is one of the most advanced navigation application providers for both Android and Ios devices. Now the company has marked its place in the family tracking app.
likewise, you can track their children wherever they are in the world. This tracking feature is now available in the free option as well. But it used to be in the premium version only.
Not many tracking apps think about the user experience, but the developers of this app keep on updating the UI to make it more user-friendly and easy to navigate.
Being developed by the best in the field of tracking. You can be sure of one thing that you are getting accurate location notifications when you are using this app likewise if we compare the pricing of the app with the other family locator app. It’s a bargain to get it.
You can track down the location history of your family members up to the past 7 days. In some cases, this could be helpful. If you are trying to locate a store or a place where your kids said they went to and liked it so much.
The application includes typical family location app features that you get to see in other apps. You can even get to see your favorite location on individual maps of your loved ones.
What if you don’t want to know the person’s location all the time? What if the person whom you want to track is someone who could take care of himself, an adult? 🤔
Well, if that’s the case, you could go for Glympse; just from the name of it you can make it out that it’s the app that provides you with a glimpse of the person’s location you want to track.
The individual whom you want to track down will send you a link that you can use in the app to locate and follow them. This is one of the best usages of tracking which can be used for the safety of the person who is traveling at night. It could be your friend, family, co-workers, or anyone.
You don’t need to go for the premium or any other subscriptions to get the full benefit of the app. Just install the app, and you are good to go.
Pick the recipient with whom you want to share your location and set the timer. Once this is done, a link will be generated which you can copy and send to your friend via email or phone message.
The receiver of the message doesn’t need to have the app installed on their device. They only need to have the internet, and the link will work fine.
8. Foursquare Swarm: Check-In
It’s the end of the week and you want to make plans with your family and friends. Well, now you can use this app called Foursquare Swarm which lets you find all the places that you have been to in the past couple of months.
This application helps you track down the restaurants, bars, clubs, etc. that you have already visited and liked the most.
In addition to this, you can make a group on the application and take inputs from the other family members about what they think about the location.
Furthermore, you people can share their location and live tracking details via this app to help you locate your friends who are coming to the party. The existing Foursquare feature is amazing, and it syncs with this application seamlessly.
The location-based social network Foursquare helps you connect with your friends and family through a live location app. Meaning if you are in the town and don’t know where everyone is and you get time.
You can see where the person is right now and go and meet them in person. This is much better to give someone a surprise.
For the past few years, the main company Foursquare achieved two things with its social media app. First, to show its users the places that could be of interest. Second to connect with you to the people with whom you can do those places together.
It might not be a family location app, but it uses the same technology in a better way, which helps you connect with your friends and family members who are living in different states.
9. Microsoft Family Safety – Best family tracking app free
Connectivity has been the savior of many struggling parents during the lockdown. Kids have been able to use PCs, tablets, and mobile devices to access online home-learning resources and maintain contact with their peers, and the web has also provided younger users with a much-needed distraction in lockdown’s more boring moments, thanks to online gaming, video streaming, and more.
When we’re all relying on our devices more than usual, it’s important to keep one eye on your kids’ and grandkids’ digital habits – which is where Microsoft’s new Family Safety tool comes in.
Family Safety takes a multi-faceted approach to protect your children’s digital and physical safety. If you’re worried they’re using their devices too much, for example, you can impose screen-time limits.
You can also filter out inappropriate apps and games, restrict web browsing to kid-friendly sites (though only when using Microsoft’s own Edge browser), and whitelist tools or sites that are used for school and learning.
You’ll get a weekly report on your family members’ activity, and you can even enable a location-sharing feature that allows you to monitor where your family members are in the real world.
The cross-platform nature of Microsoft’s tool means that it’s uniquely positioned to let you monitor activity across PCs, Xbox games consoles, and mobile devices – but it’s not perfect.
Currently, you can’t monitor or restrict ios app use, for example, so you’ll need to use Family safety in conjunction with Apple’s own parental control tools.
At the time of our research on Best Family Tracking Apps To Track Your Family Member, we found a video about “20 Ways We Use GPS Without Knowing It” which is worth watching.
✅FAQ
What is the best family tracker app?
FamiSafe is among the top recommendation for family tracking apps. It is a great tracking app free for iPhone and Android. Life360 family locator was designed keeping in mind the entire family. Another popular tracker is Sygic Family Locator.
Is there a free Family Tracker?
Sygic Family Locator is an intelligent solution for free tracking. It will help track the location of your kids and staging connected with them. It is available for both iPhone and Android.
Which app is better than Life360?
FamiSafe is among the best alternative for Life360. It can be used as an excellent parental control device to manage the kids’ activities. It can also track other movements on their phone.
How can I track a family member’s location?
Start by opening the Family Link app, choose your child, and click set-up on the location. Now click turn on; it may take a while to identify the location of your child’s device.
Can I track my child’s phone without them knowing?
Tracking others’ phones isn’t legal. However, as per law, it is permissible for parents to track their child’s phone using monitoring apps like mSpy on their devices. It is allowed only for underage kids.
What is the best app to track my daughter?
Family tracker apps are a clever way to monitor a child’s online activities via smartphones. Some of the best apps include Life360, Kidslox, Eyezy, FamiSafe, Verizon Smart Family, Qustodio Parental Control, etc.
Does Life360 cost money?
The primary service of Life360 is 100% free. However, there are paid memberships, like Life360 Platinum, Gold, and Silver. They offer advanced features for tracking your loved ones.
What is the best free app to track your child’s location?
Life360 is among the best app to track your child’s location. It is available for iOS and Android for free. It will help you by monitoring the location of your child and other family members.
Does Life360 ever mess up?
The deactivation of the location can sometimes produce wrong results and lead to confusion. The location accuracy becomes a question due to inadequate location services.
Does Google have a family tracking app?
Yes, the Family Link app from Google assists parents in staying updated with their child’s exploration of their mobile phones. It helps parents monitor and set the way their children use digital devices.
Conclusion
So there you have it, these are some of the best family tracking apps that you could find on the Play stores of your respective devices. One more thing we would like to say to you is don’t think about tracking down your family members unnecessarily.
Everyone has a private life that they want to talk about. It is better to use these apps for a good purpose only. Otherwise, it will only create differences in the relations of family friends, and coworkers.