One thing that no one – Teenagers, Kids, or Adults – leave back today is their smartphone. And what all smartphones have in common is a GPS-enabled geo-location tracking feature.
Life360 is one of the most popular geo-location tracking apps. The difference between the other and Life360 was that it was the first one to make this into a successful family locator and emergency responder service.
It allowed family members to stay, easily and privately, connected with their loved ones. Its membership can be availed only invitation from the group manager, usually the most responsible person in the family – the mother or the father.
All family members get a live update on the shared locations by other family members. Everyone gets notified about changes in others’ locations.
The need to stay about the whereabouts of your loved ones, for their safety and your peace of mind, is what is on offer from an app like Life360. The app does not interfere with the personal space of the users, kids, and teens alike.
Life360 can act as your emergency beacon in times of accidents and medical emergencies.
For parents, who are at home or at work, the safety of their children, and the elderly at home, schools, and public spaces is the biggest fear.
Subscribing to such an application that allows you to track them – from your iOS or Android phones, and desktops – is more like an investment in a home safety application.
In this brief guide, we cover all the core, optional, and really optional features of the app to uncover its true potential.
The Life360 app offers a real-time, location-sharing service that can synchronize your location data with trusted friends and family. You get automated notifications when your family members enter or exit a designated location, driving, or are involved in a car crash.
For people, whose children are away from work, one less stress of having no knowledge about their whereabouts does very well. The circle of a family can always uses the group chat feature to stay connected when someone is away.
Life360 is much more than getting directions on Google Maps, hailing a cab, or tracking our shipments. Life360 gave a new lease of life to other geolocation app developers by giving them a novel business model.
Its Family Locator service simplifies the tracking of the children, teens, and elderly an easy job like reading a notification or a message.
People love to move around and about, especially teens and young adults. If they do not come home by curfew time, then all parents get very anxious and sweat cold sweat. This same thing may happen to seniors, and they may need immediate assistance.
Youth going on bike trips, road trips, ridesharing with apps, and inter-city school trips leave their parents a worried lot. It does not intrude on the privacy of the children or other family members but keeps you informed that everyone is safe.
Wondershare’s FamiSafe is one of the most competitive alternatives to Life360. FamiSafe isn’t limited to live tracking your loved ones, it allows users to leverage its efficient parental control tool to track and manage other activities of your child and family members.
It also comes with some additional features such as blocking apps, inappropriate pictures, and websites, carrying out in-app purchases, and many more. It also allows you to check the battery levels on your children’s and family members’ phones, manage their social media accounts, and even check their location history.
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Monthly Plan – $10.99, Quarterly Plan – $20.99, and Annual Plan – $60.99
It is another popular family GPS tracker application that comes with chat features. It is compatible with all GPS-enabled android phones. It allows you to detect the accurate location of your family members on a private map. You can chat with your family members and even get a notification if their battery level is low.
It let you track your child’s movement every day and share their location with other family members. It comes with a full-fledged Family GPS Tracker, where you see your family member in real-time.
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It is a Free application
It is slightly different from the Life360 application. It is more of a fitness tracker application, that helps you stay focused and motivated to achieve your objectives. It offers a live tracking feature that enables you to share your real-time running location with your family member to give them complete peace of mind.
It comes with multiple advanced tracking tools, which could be seamlessly integrated with wearables and other gadgets. The premium version comes with the Live Tracking function, which let you share your location with your loved ones in real time.
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It could cost you $5.99 per month or $29.99 a year.
If you want a free application that can track the live location of your family members, then you should opt for Google Maps without any doubt. Google Maps mapped more than 220 countries, which let you track your loved ones, provided they have enabled the location tracking feature at their end.
Google Maps let you share the location for a selected duration, you can stop sharing your real-time location using the same menu. It also lets you create a location-sharing link, that can be shared with your family members via an instant messaging application.
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It is available free of cost.
It is one of the most popular and reliable location-sharing applications available in the market. It relies on the cell phone tracker, which let you locate the location of your family member’s mobile device location, monitor their movement, their driving, and many more.
It let you create a circle to add your family members and friends, and then track their activities. It reports the real-time location of your loved ones using cutting-edge GPS location data and coordinates. Overall, it is a reliable and efficient alternative to the Life360 app that one can use.
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A free version, Gold membership plan – $14.99 per month, and Platinum membership plan – $24.99 per month.
Any app like Life360 must be able to capture and share the real-time indoor location of all the devices in the group with all other members on a real-time basis. Staying connected and being aware of the whereabouts of your kids or family elders was never so easy.
When you are reaching a common destination in different vehicles, from different places, keeping everyone in sync with the group or family becomes that much easier.
Do away with repeated “where are you?” calls and messages. Get alerts when each member of the family checks in at designated destinations and helps anyone running late.
Once all family members have the LIfe360 clone app installed and have been added to the group, you can find them in case of an emergency like natural calamity, accidents, medical emergencies, and other eventualities. Each member gets a unique icon to easily identify who’s who and where.
An app like Life360 must provide crash or accident detection – a speeding car suddenly halted, the gyro sensor detecting a fall, the device location going out of the comfort zone, or no activity on the device at an unusual time of the day are all red flags that you cans set up to receive alerts and call for help.
The app can then be used to notify other members of your group, your designated emergency contacts, and an emergency helpline like 911.
Teenagers and adults don’t like to be tracked 24/7 and want to have some privacy. With the zone feature, they can define a temporary zone for a few hours.
When turned on, all other members will see them as a stationary dot, as long as they are within the zone radius and before the time runs out.
The group administrators or parents can uncover the zone before time is elapsed if they think the kids haven’t called in a home to check within an agreed-upon interval. Making zones allows the family a sense of control while protecting the privacy of the user.
In case of situations like a car breakdown, running out of fuel, dead battery, weather troubles, minor accidents, or some other problem, you can always call the 24/7 roadside help through the Life360 clone app by tapping on the “Roadside Assistance” button. Partner service providers will reach you at the earliest to help you sort out the problem and get you going in your car or a taxi.
When your kids are leaving a stadium or a concert or a busy mall, you may not be able to find them despite being at the same address.
You can simply tap the icon for the family member to get directions on how to reach them by using their real-time location, which is correct up to 1 meter.
Any app like Life360 should offer extensive reporting to the group administrator to assess the location history and driving behavior of your family members.
This can help you trace their steps back and see if they are showing any signs of potentially dangerous behavior like rash driving, going to places where they shouldn’t, and using the phone while driving a car.
Nearby safety points, emergency rooms, and potential danger/restricted zones around the current location of each member.
An app like Life360 should also offer location tracing using non-smartphones as many members of the family have that phone only. For this, the cell tower triangulation services are used, which are not exact but give you the correct location within a 10 to 25 feet radius.
For an App like Life360, there must be at least two UIs – one for the admin to manage all groups and users, and one for the users themselves. Let’s check out the features on both:
Simply designing the app and getting the customers to know about it are the easiest parts. Asking users to give up their privacy, encouraging them not to turn off either the app or the GPS, and convincing them that in the long run this app will be a crucial part of your life.
Any App like Life360 works on GPS and Internet-based location services. Everyone in the group should allow the app to access its features. Now, you and your loved ones can see all members on a shared and private map. This setting allows us to show locations accurately and quickly.
Any app like Life360 would require permission to access the location, Internet, calls, and messaging and offer real-time service during emergencies, sudden stoppage of the car, minor or major accidents, and 24×7 roadside help.
If even one of the users has disabled their GPS or denied the app permission to access it, then our location-based services would not be available to work. To persuade them, we need:
The biggest reason that users will use your app like Life360 if they are convinced that your location data – archived or live – will not be shared with the government and third parties. According to Pew Research Center, more than a third or 35% of users routinely disable their tracking.
To alleviate such concerns of “Big Brother is watching,” be transparent about your user data usage policy in simple terms like what you will do or not do with user data.
Everyone needs to get personalized offers from nearby stores and salons. Enabling the geo-location but increasing sales.
To increase engagement, use relevant notifications, offer games that use the geo-location, and add rewards, points, and levels to the app. integrate all major social media channels with the app so that users can post their photos and videos from the app like Life360.
Many apps that make use of geo-location-based services like salon apps and fitness- do not show the exact location of the device and are off by several meters. Your app like Life360 must give the exact location of the users within a meter.
Many phones’ OS does not allow by default background tracking. Therefore, we must allow explicitly geo-location service to be available to the app even when running in the background.
Apple’s store marketplace app has very strict rules on the privacy, security, and safety of the apps. It is not easy to get approval from the iOS community. If your app is rejected, then find out the reasons and eliminate them before uploading once again.
GPS and other applications will drain your phone’s battery, so your app like Life360 must be efficient when using the battery and increase the minimal life of the battery. By reducing the GPS accuracy.
The tech stack for a GPS-enabled geo location based app will require, among all the common APIs and tools, platform-specific tools. At the very least two APIs from iOS and Android are needed to work on all smartphones.
On an iOS device, one can use:
To find any Android device through your app, you can use:
If your users are going to access their app’s website via a laptop, then HTML5 can come to the rescue. The website and the PWA can have geolocation data using the W3C Geolocation API with HTML5 code.
Well, this is an important question and most of the time this question is raised in the first client meeting itself. Fortunately, we have an answer to that as well, that too a detailed one. If you are planning to develop an application like Life360 with some basic features, then it could cost $25,000 to $35,000 for a single platform. However, the definite cost depends on the number of features you want to integrate, and the various other functionalities you are expecting from your mobile application.
If you are planning to develop a location-based mobile application with basic features for multiple platforms, then it could cost you around $45,000-$55,000. If you want to integrate advanced GPS features, modern technology, complex design, and captivating UI/UX, then it may cost you $65,000-$80,000.
However, location-based mobile application development cost depends on various other factors, including :
So, we can analyze and calculate the app development budget based on the above parameters. We can assure you the best price in the market, as we have optimized the mobile app development process, which enables us to develop feature-rich applications while keeping the overall cost less.
A location tracking app has many uses – family groups, friends, co-workers, a fleet of shipment vehicles, etc. It is a beneficial idea as a business plan. The subscription model allows you to build a loyal base of users application. The app can bring about change in your life when you can rest assured that your kids and parents are safe, and you can track them.
Arka Softwares is a global service and solutions provider of most standard and highly customized business app solutions. With more than 10 of experience, our professional and well-trained developers can design and deliver an app like Life360 in no time.
Having delivered 600+ expert IT solutions to more than 450+ clients put Arka Softwares in the major league of software development services.
The client-centric approach and user-friendly designs insure against any problems in the method. It helps both the client and their customers.
We hope that this blog will help you understand the nitty-gritty of the development of location-based services and GPS-tracking applications. Such applications are indeed the best digital solutions for end-users to locate their assets, navigate places, monitor the activities of their loved ones, online deliveries, and even track their missing children.
As GPS tracking and location-based application development are gaining momentum due to ever-growing demand, it has become a fruitful proposition to venture into the development of such applications. However, you must have a reliable partner and brilliant app development methodology in place to carve out a successful application.
If you have a unique application idea and are looking for a renowned mobile app development partner, then feel free to connect with our experts. Arka Softwares is known for creating best-in-class GPS-enabled location tracking service applications for our clients across banking, retail, healthcare, travel and logistics, and many other industries.
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