Keep Track of Family and Friends: Location Sharing Apps

They’re called location sharing apps and the premise is simple: you and all your friends and family share where each other are at any time, cutting out the need to keep checking email or sending text messages back-and-forth. They are a kind of app that continues to get better as tech evolves. Here’s three of the best:

Glympse lets users share their location in real-time with other Glympse users through GPS. Set it up with friends, family, co-workers, or anyone and they’ll know exactly where you are and when you’ll be meeting with them. Users can set Glympse to work for a specific time period, too, so you don’t have to worry about others tracking your every move all the time, either. Glympse is free for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone.

Life360 is built around location sharing for families, setting up what it calls small circles to automatically share information such as location and safe arrival. Users can create custom circles, too, such as if a group of friends or family are going on a trip and want to keep track of each other for a short time. Life360 also allows for chatting and sending private messages to other users. It’s free for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone.

PlaceUs aims to set itself apart several ways, including working in a way that isn’t a battery drain. It, too, allows users to set up circles of people to share info with, but only does so when others try to check another user’s location. PlaceUs claims to not only share locations with approved other users, but learn frequent destinations, such as the gym. It can be set up to send reminders, too, say, for example, if you haven’t been to that gym in a long time. PlaceUs is for iOS only.

Check out my report on location-sharing apps for NBC-TV below to see what these apps look like in action: