I’ve been using Life360 for close to ten years. I don’t remember how long exactly but started using it when my second child was a teenager, and she just turned 26. It’s been extremely helpful in past years not to snoop (although that’s what we were doing with our kids) but to keep tabs on my mom as well as the rest of the family.
It was useful in conjunction with the two home automation software packages I use, HomeSeer and HomeAssistant. I had quite a few automations set up based on location. Arrive home, at night? The front porch light turns on and the front door unlocks. Stuff like that.
Unfortunately, Life360 has chosen to block third parties from accessing its data and will not be providing its paid users with any sort of api to use either (I am gold level and pay $10 a month for the service).
Going forward I am going to be cancelling my subscription once I find an easy, viable alternative. May cancel it right away. With the free account you can have two “places” and it gives crash detection (something built into our phones now anyway).
I am limited in what I will be using but a few of the alternatives are listed below.
Home Assistant App– Does the same thing. I would miss being able to track in real time but it’s available for iPhone (my mom) and Android (the rest of us). The problem with HA is that it means I either must get it installed on everyone’s phones and get the setup right or expect them to do it. Probably not happening.
Bark. More of a parental control app which is not what I want. It is available for both ios and android. Don’t know if they have an accessible API.
Tasker. Android only. Difficult for new end users to set up, I would have to do the work and hope that nobody disabled it by accident. I already use it and, in the past, have used it for location based stuff for my personal phone, probably will continue.
Monitoring ip addresses on my network. I have done this in the past as well. It works well for automations when they are already here and connected so can’t have automations run quite as early as with Life360, but I will use this as well.
If anyone has any decent suggestions, please let me know. Open to alternatives.
Leave a Reply