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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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
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
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 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 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 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 for listening to rich on Tech Daily. Hopefully subscribe to this podcast. Just search rich on Tech in your face favorite podcasting app and be sure to rate and review this podcast. That's the only way that other people discover
it outside the rich on techies. Thanks so much for listening. I'll talk to you next time.