Life360 vs Find My: Which One Tracks You More?

Find My is the better choice if everyone uses an iPhone and you only need to know where people are now: it is free, built in and involves no extra company. Life360 makes sense if someone uses Android, or if you want location history, driving reports and crash detection, most of which sit in its paid plans.

Side by side

Plan contents and prices change, so treat the Life360 column as the shape of it rather than a price list, and check the app before you pay.

What Find My is good at

It is already on every iPhone, and sharing takes two taps. You can be notified when someone arrives at or leaves a place. And it keeps no history: the people you share with see where you are, not where you have been, which some families will see as a feature and others as a gap. Who keeps a location history, and who does not covers that in detail.

It is also the only one of the two that can help you find your own phone when it is switched off, through the Find My network.

What Life360 adds

• Android. The main reason mixed families use it. Find My location sharing needs Apple devices.
• History. Places visited and, depending on the plan, drives.
• Driving features. Reports on speed and phone use while driving, and crash detection, mostly in paid tiers. Recent iPhones have Apple’s own Crash Detection built in, separately from Find My.
• Battery levels. The circle can see each other’s battery, and be warned when it runs low.

On privacy

Find My involves you, the people you share with and Apple. Life360 adds a company whose business depends on location. In late 2021, The Markup reported that Life360 had sold users’ location data to data brokers; Life360 then said it would stop selling precise location data to them. Its current privacy policy is the place to check what it does now.

Neither app should be the only thing a family relies on for trust. Both are easy to get round for anyone who wants to, as the guides to Life360 and location sharing on iPhone make clear.

The third option

Google Maps location sharing is free and works across iPhone and Android. Like Find My it shows current location only, and like Life360 it shows battery level. For a mixed family that wants no subscription, it is worth trying first.

Where PinDrift fits

Both apps show the location the phone reports, and PinDrift changes that for the whole phone, so it affects both the same way. Neither is a competitor of ours. If you are choosing between them for your family, choose on the features above, not on how easy either one is to fool.