With the app installed on your child's Android phone, their position appears on a map inside your dashboard, along with the time of the last report, the route history, and alerts when they enter or leave an area you define. It is not a dot that moves second by second: the phone reports its position at intervals and needs a connection to do it. With a minor child in your care this is usually legal; on an adult's phone, without their consent, it is a crime.
The real question is almost never “where are they”. It is “did they get to school?” or “why haven't they answered for an hour?”. This page explains what the map shows, how often it updates, what geofences are for, and the situations where you will not see anything.
You open the dashboard in any browser and see a map with the last reported position and the exact time of that report. That time is the key piece of information: it tells you whether you are looking at something from three minutes ago or three hours ago. Next to it is the route history, with every point time-stamped, so you can reconstruct yesterday's trip. What you will not see is where they were before you installed the app: the history starts the day you set it up and does not go back.
The phone reports its position at intervals, not continuously. A dot moving live second by second would drain the battery in a few hours; no parental control app works that way, even if some imply otherwise. We do not give a fixed interval: it depends on the model, on the Android version and on whether battery saver is on, and promising an exact number would mean making it up.
A geofence is an area you mark on the map — school, your home, a friend's house — so you get an alert when the phone enters or leaves it. It changes the habit: instead of checking the map fifteen times over the afternoon, you find out when they arrived and get on with your day. If the phone has no connection, the alert does not go out until it has signal again.
Without an internet connection the location does not update: the map keeps the last known point, with its time, until there is signal again. With GPS turned off the accuracy drops: the position becomes approximate, good enough for the neighborhood but not for the street corner. A phone that is switched off reports nothing, and any service that promises to locate a powered-off device is lying. The subway, an elevator or a road with no coverage leave the same gap: a blank space is almost always the signal, not your child. Sometimes it is not — airplane mode leaves exactly the same gap — and that is a conversation to have with them, not something the app resolves.
Installation is done once, with physical access to your child's phone: Android 8.0 or later, no root, a few minutes. After that the phone is used as normal. Location uses battery on any phone, whatever app it is running; reporting at intervals, rather than continuously, keeps that drain at a reasonable level. We are not going to give you a percentage: it depends on the model and on how old the battery is. Of the plans, what is worth looking at here is how many devices each one covers: Medium one, Gold two, Platinum three. If you are supervising the phones of two children, Medium is not enough. There is a three-day free trial, no card required, to see how it reports the location before paying anything.
Our recommendation is always the same: tell them the phone is supervised. The app runs in the background and does not add an icon to the home screen, but it is not designed to hide from them. Location, besides, is the easiest feature to agree on: “text me when you get there” turned into an automatic alert is a rule many kids accept without arguing. Checking the map all day, on the other hand, breaks the trust you are trying to protect: it makes sense when there is a concrete reason, and for as long as that reason lasts. On an adult's phone, without their consent, there is no nuance: it is a crime.
The phone reports its position at intervals while it has a connection, not second by second. The dashboard shows you the time of the last report, so you know how recent it is.
Yes, in the route history, with date and time on every point. What you will not find are the routes from before the installation: the record starts when you set up the app.
With no connection, the map stops updating and keeps the last known point with its time. A phone that is switched off reports nothing, and no app can locate it.
No. The position is calculated by the phone itself, so the app has to be installed there and you need to have the phone in hand once. No one can be located from their number alone.
With a minor child in your care, generally yes, with limits that change from country to country and with age. With an adult, without their consent, it is a crime. We publish country guides with the articles cited and a link to the official source.
Keep reading: Tracking the phone: the rest of the features · Is it legal to monitor my child? · Plans, devices and free trial