Life360 Mobile App

I am being compensated by Splash Creative Media on behalf of Life360 to write this post. The opinions contained within are mine and mine alone.

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It’s our job as parents, to make sure nothing happens to our children.  But there comes a time when we have to cut the proverbial apron strings and let them go out on their own.  I actually wonder these days how my mom ever did that back when our way of checking in (if any) was by having a quarter and finding the nearest pay phone.  Times sure have changed and I can say that I’m glad for the technology of smart phones. 

Letting your tweens/teens out on their own can cause enough anxiety, and now in our case we’re in a new city where we’ve only lived for a couple of months, so we have an added worry of not really even knowing a lot about our community and our daughter is meeting new friends whom we are unfamiliar with.  Without being helicopter parents we still wanted to have some idea of where she is when she goes out and how to deal with an emergency should one come up.

We were recently introduced to Life360, a free mobile app for iOS and Android, that allows you to stay connected, in a variety of ways, to the people important to you.  It’s similar to the ‘check in’ services on Facebook or Foursquare but with some added layers that go a step beyond just letting people know “I’m at such and such location.”

If you’ve used Google+ you’re familiar with the concept of ‘Circles.’  Life360 uses this same community grouping and within the app you can create Circles of family and friends to virtually check in with one another.  You can set up frequented places that you or your family are at often, like your home, your work place, the grocery store, the library etc.  Then you can create alerts within your Circles to see when a specific person arrives or leaves those places (they must have location services enabled on their phone).

One of the extra layers that I really like about Life360 is that you can turn on features such as the locations of hospitals, fire departments and police stations.  Likewise you can enable to see on the maps the home locations of sex offenders and places where crimes have been committed.  As the parent of a teenage girl this is a premium feature in my opinion and it comes with the free version of Life360 which I really appreciate.  There’s a nifty Panic Alert tool as well, so if you feel worried being out alone at night or if an actual emergency situation crops up, you can simply hit the alert button and within 10 seconds a message, text and phone call will be sent out to everyone within the circle.

It’s also completely private, meaning you only share with who you want to share.  I know that one can do that within Facebook, but it takes a number of extra clicks to find the group you want to notify, in Life360 it’s simple and seamless to change groups, whether it’s a permanent group like your immediate family or a temporary group that you are only using for one specific event.

I’m really liking the freedom Life360 is giving our daughter to meet new friends and explore new places in our new city without us hovering over her.  It’s a good transition for her as she forges ahead to college next year where we won’t be around to always look out for her.  This way she can still let us know where she is, without us making a big deal out of it, and it gives us less anxiety knowing she can contact us or trusted friends if she feels uncomfortable in a situation or place whether at home or out and about.

There is SO much more to this app, and much of it is free for anyone who downloads it.  There is a paid premium version as well if you want even more features to work with.

Visit http://www.life360.com/ to learn more about this app and if you like what you see you can download it to stay connected with the people who matter to you.