Best phone tracking app for android?

[UrbanAchiever]

I need to track my kids after one of them failed to arrive home from school at his usual time. We were driving around for an hour trying to find him and of course he wasn't answering his phone (do they ever?) Turns out he was hanging out very near our house with one of his friends but we didn't know that!

We are an Android household (Samsung) so the iPhone find my friends is no good for us.

I've tried Life360 3 times over the years and found it sporadic and a terrible drain on batteries, which means my kids don't want to use it.

Can anyone recommend something better? What about Google maps tracking? I cannot find any info about how it tracks (GPS, wifi, 4G?).

Many thanks.

[trashbat]

You know that there's a platform one? Google's 'Find My Phone'. Works well, for stuff with your account on it anyway.

[alfabeat]

We just use the location sharing option on Google maps. It's always on and I can see where any family member is at anytime. Seems to work well for us, you forget it's on and doesn't seem to adversely impact battery life much.

[the-norseman]

Just use the built in one.

[UrbanAchiever]

Thanks everyone. I'll give it a go.

[paulrockliffe]

I think if you have all your people's accounts setup as a Family account with Google then the Find My Phone thing will work across family, but the Maps location sharing seems really good to me even without that.

The only thing with it is that it saves your battery by not updating all the time, but if you try to access it it pings a location request over to the target for an instant update. The risk there is that the phone is somewhere with no signal, so you don't get an update until the phone next moves.

It does at least tell you when it last updated and it is unobtrusive, doesn't kill the battery and is accessible on any device you can login to with your Google Account.

[UrbanAchiever]

Thanks everyone. Set up both my kids on Google maps app. No resistance from them this time. True test will be tomorrow when they go to school. Its working fine when they are home and connected to our home WiFi!

[s2kjock]

Surprised Life 360 didn't work well for you as it generally has for me, and I don't find battery drain too bad.

Compared to google location sharing it is more accurate and updates more quickly.

Others have found it a bit more difficult tracking me on Life 360 recently though, but I was unsure if due to my phone's systems or the app in general - certainly no issues for me tracking others.