About MobileTracking
The short version of the story about MobileTracking is that it exists because the two obvious options were both bad. One shelf of this market sells hidden spyware to people who want to read someone else’s messages. The other sells enormous dashboards that bury one useful feature under fifty settings and then send you forty notifications a day until you mute them. We wanted a third thing: a calm, visible tool that answers a parent’s real questions and tells the child exactly what it is doing.
The wall every parent hits
A child gets a phone, and the whole internet arrives in their pocket on the same afternoon.
The problem is not that parents want to spy. In our experience almost none of them do. The problem is that the phone creates a set of genuinely new questions that did not exist a generation ago, and there is no natural way to answer them. Did they get to school. Is the phone still on. Why has the evening disappeared. Who is this number that keeps ringing. These are ordinary parental questions and they deserve ordinary, boring answers.
What most people actually want is a way to stop worrying without becoming somebody who reads their child’s messages. Those two things pull in opposite directions, and most of this industry resolves the tension by selling the surveillance and hoping nobody thinks too hard about it. We think the tension resolves the other way: give the parent the shape of the day, not the contents of it, and be completely open with the child about which of those two you are collecting.
We also wanted something that survives contact with a real family. Plenty of tools work beautifully for eleven days and then get uninstalled after a row, or quietly stop reporting and nobody notices for a month. Longevity turned out to be a design problem, not a marketing one, and most of the decisions on this page follow from taking it seriously.
Transparent monitoring, and why it works better
The child knows. That single constraint shapes every screen in the product.
Transparent monitoring means the child app is a real, visible app with its own screens, and everything the parent has switched on appears there in plain language. Saved places are listed by name. Limits are shown with the times attached. There is a page describing what is collected and, just as importantly, what never is. Turn a feature on this afternoon and it appears on their phone this afternoon.
People assume this is a compromise, a nice principle that costs you effectiveness. It is the opposite. A hidden tool has exactly one failure mode and it is catastrophic: it gets discovered. When that happens you have not just lost the tool, you have lost a chunk of your credibility, and the child’s next move is to route everything important through a device you know nothing about. A visible rule cannot be discovered, because it was never a secret, so it can be argued about and adjusted like any other family arrangement.
There is a second effect that is harder to measure and probably matters more. A child who grows up being monitored in secret learns that being watched without knowing is normal. That is a genuinely bad lesson to teach someone who will spend the next sixty years surrounded by systems that would very much like to watch them without asking. Being visible about it teaches the opposite, which is that monitoring should come with a reason, a boundary and a conversation.
Four features we have turned down, and why
Every one of these has been requested, more than once, sometimes by people offering money.
No stealth mode. We will not hide the icon, disguise the app or ship a build that runs without the child’s knowledge. This is the request we receive most often and it is the easiest to decline, because a hidden monitoring tool is not a parenting product, it is a surveillance product that happens to be sold to parents. The same build would work perfectly well on a partner, and we are not interested in being that company.
No message reading. We do not collect the contents of texts, chats or direct messages, on any plan, at any price. Metadata gives you the pattern that actually flags a problem: an unknown number appearing thirty times in two days, a long call at three in the morning. The words themselves add very little to that signal and cost an enormous amount of trust.
No camera and no microphone. There is no remote photograph feature, no ambient recording and no listening of any kind. These are the calling cards of stalkerware and there is no version of the parental use case that needs them. Likewise no keylogging: we do not record what a child types, anywhere, for any feature.
We know that turning these down costs us customers. Some of them go on to buy from companies who will build all four. We would rather lose that sale than write the code, and we would rather say so plainly on this page than let anyone discover the limits after paying.
The child sees the same list you do
Before any data is shared, the family app shows a consent screen naming every feature that has been switched on and who will see the results. After setup, a transparency screen keeps that list current. There is no version of this product where a parent can see something the child has not been told about, and there will not be one.
- Consent before collectionNothing is sent until the screen listing what will be shared has been seen.
- Contents stay theirsNo message text, no camera, no microphone, no record of what was typed.
- They can push backA request button, an explanation, and rules that can be argued with like any other.
How we make money, and what that buys you
Subscriptions from parents. That is the whole model, and it is not an accident.
A location app that is free has to earn its keep somewhere, and the options are advertising, selling data to brokers, or being funded by someone who eventually wants one of those two. We took subscriptions because it is the only model where the incentives point the same way as the product. If we are paid by you, the useful thing to do is answer your question quickly and let you close the app. If we were paid by advertisers, the useful thing would be to keep you scrolling, and the design would drift accordingly.
So there is no advertising SDK in the child app, no third party analytics riding along with the location data, and no arrangement with anybody who buys movement data in bulk. It also means we are not chasing scale for its own sake. A smaller number of families who keep paying because the thing works is a better business than a large number who signed up once and muted the notifications.
On data handling, the rules are simple. Your family’s information is yours, we show it to you and to nobody else, support access for troubleshooting is limited and logged, and you can delete it. Deleting a child removes their history, closing the account removes everything, and uninstalling the family app stops collection immediately whether or not you have cancelled anything. The privacy policy has the detail.
Who this is for, and who it is not for
Being clear about the second list saves everybody a refund request.
It suits a parent or guardian of a school age child who wants a small number of honest answers: where they are, roughly how the day went, and whether anything unusual has come up. It suits families who are willing to have the conversation out loud, and it works especially well when it is loosened deliberately as a child gets older, because a rule that visibly relaxes with age is one a teenager will keep agreeing to.
It is not for tracking another adult. It is not for a partner, a housemate, an employee or an elderly relative who has not asked for it, and the visible child app makes it a poor tool for that even if someone tried. It is not for a parent who specifically wants to read messages, because that feature does not exist here and no plan unlocks it. And it is not a substitute for talking to your child, which is the thing that actually does the work. It is a set of small, dull answers that gives you the calm to have those conversations properly.
A small team, most of whom are parents of children in exactly this age range. We ship slowly and turn down a lot of feature requests, which is why the list is nineteen features rather than ninety.
No. It is the single request we have declined most often. A build that can hide itself is a stalkerware build regardless of how it is marketed, and we will not write it.
No. Not to advertisers, brokers, insurers or anyone else. The subscription is the entire business model, which is exactly why there is no free tier funded by something less pleasant.
Write to us. Most of the meaningful improvements in this product started as an email from a parent describing something that annoyed them, and we read every one of them.
See the thing itself
Open the read only demo family and click through a week of realistic data, or create an account and set up your own.