Find My Kids ~ Footprints‪™‬ 4+

Giving it two more stars than it deserves only because it works, despite the inconveniences I mention below.

I’ve not found it as hard to set up as others may describe, but am dismayed that when setting up a geofence you have to physically scroll the map and zoom in to the location you want. For some reason they have not provided a search function to allow you to pinpoint an exact address.
Very inconvenient for when you are setting up a geofence in a location that is far away (I.e. across the country) and you don’t know enough about the location. I had to switch back and forth between the phone’s native map app and Footprints several times to pinpoint the locations for my long distance geofences.

Also, when setting a geofence the map can only display in hybrid mode, even when you change the main screen’s map settings to just a plain old graphical map. This makes setting a the above mentioned long distance geofence even more cumbersome, as the map refresh rates are much slower.

It would also be great if you could use a logged waypoint to set up a geofence. No can do.

Lastly in the complaint department, tracking others won’t work unless you switch both location tracking and location sharing on for your own phone, even though you may not be giving others (I.e. your kids) permission to track you. What this tells me is Footprints is forcing you to track yourself and is likely using your location data for their own purposes.

Kept dropping “friends” and stating I didn’t have any. Bought three year subscriptions for me and two kids in January. One has started stating it has expired. Had to continuously allow location sharing even when set through the settings. While it worked, it had good functionality but now is just a waste of money.

A few things to know - it's a free app, and free to use the first month however after that you pay $.99/month or $2.99/year or $4.99 for 2 years - which I'd say is reasonable for what you get. You have to get the program on all phones you're following and they have to give permission. I got this app along with setting up Find my Iphone with the icloud program on my iphone 4 for comparison. Find my Iphone only shows current location - and is pretty accurate. You can use it for iphones/ipads on your account. I like being able to look at both to see what the difference is in location, however for the most part I've been impressed with the accuracy of the locations on Footprints. You can't count on it being always exactly right, but it's been pretty accurate most of the time. We live the country where you normally have weak cell signals and the accurancy on our property shows if its in the driveway, in the house, on the patio, in an outbuilding, neighbors, etc. It takes a little figuring out to get it set up, but I had it installed and working on a phone within 15 minutes. It seems to update mostly when there's a positional change and you stop for awhile... such as I could see a phone at the grocery store, a stop light, another stop light, and the driveway. if you're in motion it doesn't seem to put a waypoint. You can set it up to show the last so many waypoints - which is great if you're trying to track something and can't look for awhile.