Location-sharing apps flood the market, read our recent guest editor, Manuel De La Esperanza of WAVE Application, the hugely popular private location app, along with Vincent Gibson of Centric App, a video discovery and sharing platform matching video content with local audiences.

There are parents keeping track of children, romance-seekers looking for local love and others locating late friends’ whereabouts. Some drain your phone battery and threaten privacy. Yet others are pure genius. We pick a few favourites in no particular order.

FIND MY IPHONE
itunes.apple.com


Losing your smartphone, or having it stolen is one of the most infuriating experiences. While this app won’t stop you losing your handset, it will help you find it by pinpointing your missing device on a map. Once located, the app can remotely lock it, play a sound, display a message or erase all the data on it. That way, thieves can’t feast on your financial data. Make sure you install this so you have a plan in place when you can’t find your phone.

POKEMON GO
www.pokemongo.com


Dominating the app store this summer was the mobile gaming hit Pokemon Go. Nintendo’s app encourages players (many are children) to explore their real neighbourhood by using their smartphone as a map to collect Pokemon and items in Pokestops. July stats from app analytics company, Sensor Tower, imply that users spend more hours playing Pokemon Go than Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter. Look out for Poke Radar and Helper for Pokemon Go, both Pokemon-locating apps.

FAMILY LOCATOR BY LIFE 360
www.life360.com


Follow the every move of your offspring with Life360, a mobile tracking app downloaded to both parent’s and child’s smartphones. Surely, this constant monitoring is a bit Big Brother? Perhaps, but such technology gives parent’s peace of mind and in turn, allows the child more freedom as they are trusted. It also features an emergency button so if in danger, the child can press it and it will send a message telling the recipient exactly where he is. Tailored for families and small groups, users can share their location with a chosen few. It allows you to communicate within groups or one-to-one and sends automatic notifications of arrival and departure at chosen locations.

HAPPN
www.happn.com


Looking for love online? Chances are you’re more likely to have something in common with someone at a similar pub, concert or venue than a complete stranger you swiped online in your lunch break. This is the thought behind Happn, the mobile dating app that matches users within a 250-meter radius. When you cross paths with other users, their profiles ping in your feed. You can then view and like, and if the approval is mutual, you message to meet up. It has an interesting business model. In the app’s terms, it talks about ‘charming’ other users which is one step further than ‘liking’ one. When a man runs out of ‘charms’, he must pay for more (10 charms cost £1.49). Meanwhile, women get them free. Rather like drinks at the bar then.

IS
isapp.com


The strangely named new app called Is hopes to revolutionise how users think about location-sharing apps. It offers complete control of when and how you share your whereabouts and with whom. In a nutshell, it won’t broadcast your location when you want to stay in hiding and you can switch off the alerts to remove yourself from the map. The at-a-glance tracking allows you to watch friends move around a map in real time without needing to hit a refresh button. The app also offers one-to-one and group messaging and alerts you when a friend is near a particular meeting place.

September 2016