Life360 Not Updating Location? How to Fix It

When Life360 stops updating someone’s location, the cause is usually a setting on their iPhone: location access not set to Always, Precise Location off, Background App Refresh off, Low Power Mode on, or Motion & Fitness access turned off. Fix those on that phone and it normally recovers within minutes.

Nothing you change on your own phone will fix someone else’s. If it is a family member’s location that is stuck, these are the settings to go through with them.

How Life360 decides when to update

Life360 does not stream a position every second. iOS limits how much any app can do in the background, and Life360 is built to lean on the system: it gets its chance to report when the phone moves a meaningful distance, when a drive starts, and at intervals iOS chooses. A phone sitting still at home reports far less often than one on the move. That is deliberate, and it is the reason the app does not flatten a battery by lunchtime.

So “updated 45 minutes ago” on someone who has been at home all evening is normal. The same timestamp on someone you know is driving is not.

The settings to check, in order

1. Location access set to Always, with Precise Location on. Settings, Privacy & Security, Location Services, Life360. On “While Using the App”, Life360 only sees the location while it is open on screen. With Precise Location off, it gets a broad area instead of a point. How the location permissions work has the detail.
2. Location Services itself. The switch at the top of that same screen. If it is off, no app gets a location at all.
3. Background App Refresh. Settings, General, Background App Refresh. It needs to be on for the phone and on for Life360, or the app gets far fewer chances to send what it knows.
4. Low Power Mode. It trims background activity across the whole phone. Life360 keeps working, but updates arrive further apart. iOS offers to switch it on at 20 per cent, and plenty of people say yes and forget.
5. Motion & Fitness. Settings, Privacy & Security, Motion & Fitness. Life360 asks for motion access to tell when a drive starts and when the phone is still. Without it, it has less to go on about when to report.
6. Cellular data for Life360. Settings, Cellular, Life360. If it is off, the phone knows where it is but cannot tell anyone once it leaves Wi-Fi.
7. Do not swipe it away. Life360 is built to run in the background. Swiping an app out of the app switcher tells iOS you want it stopped, and for several kinds of background work iOS then leaves it alone until it is opened again. If it has been swiped away, open it once.
8. Offload Unused Apps. Settings, App Store, Offload Unused Apps. iOS can remove an app it thinks you do not use, keeping its data. A tracking app that nobody ever opens is exactly the kind of app that looks unused.

Reading it from the other side

You can often tell which of these it is without touching the phone:

• An old timestamp on someone who has not moved. Normal. Life360 reports less when nothing is happening.
• A status line under their name. Life360 shows a short message when it knows why it has no fresh location, such as location permission being off or the phone being unreachable. The wording changes between app versions, but it usually names the setting.
• A current timestamp at a place they are clearly not. The phone is reporting that place. Either the phone is there and they are not, or the location it reports has been changed. Telling the two apart is harder than people expect.
• Nothing at all. Most often a flat battery, no signal or a phone switched off.

If it is still stuck

Restart the phone, then open Life360 and leave it on screen for a minute. Make sure the app is up to date. If that does not do it, sign out of Life360 and back in, or delete it and install it again: circles belong to the account, not to the copy of the app on the phone.

Where PinDrift fits

Life360 reports whatever location the phone reports. If that location has been set with a tool like PinDrift, everything above still applies, because Life360 still needs its permissions and its background time to send it anywhere. One thing specific to us: in desktop mode, a location set from a computer stops within a couple of seconds of the phone losing touch with that computer, and the phone goes back to reporting where it really is. If Life360 flips between two places, that is the first thing to rule out.