Life360 Not Updating Location? 146 Reviews (2026)

If Life360 is showing someone at home when they are not, or has not moved their dot in an hour, the reviews say two things that are worth knowing before you start troubleshooting your phone. First, this is the single most common complaint about the app right now, by a wide margin. Second, several reviewers report the same specific behaviour: the location updates on a roughly 60 to 90 second cycle and jumps between points instead of following a route, and they say it started after an update.

On 5 August 2026 we pulled the 500 newest US reviews from both stores. On Google Play, 115 of 500 were rated 1-3 stars and 80 were long enough to categorise, spanning 30 July to 4 August 2026, a six-day window. On the App Store, 91 of 500 were 1-3 stars and 66 were long enough to categorise, covering versions 26.27.0 through 26.28.1. That is 146 categorised complaints.

The gap between the two store averages is the widest we have seen on a major app this month: 0.29 stars, on more than two million ratings each side. That is worth holding onto while reading, because the accuracy complaint is not evenly split between the platforms either.

The Short Answer: 44.5% of Complaints Are About Location

65 of the 146 reviews describe a location that is late, frozen, or simply wrong. On Android it is 32 of 80, which is 40.0%. On iOS it is 33 of 66, which is 50.0%. No other cluster in either set comes close.

location accuracy is very low. app tells me someone has arrived home when they are at least half a mile away.

Tonight my wife is at a friends with my daughter but Life360 says she is at home. Why pay for a tracking app that isn’t reliable?

your telling me my wife has been at work for two days while she's here at home.

It tells me that everybody in my family is at home right now and I know two of them are gone and one of them has been gone for a month

tonight the app completely didn't track my son leaving the house for a couple hrs & coming bk home.

The failure mode people describe most often is not a missing dot. It is a stale one presented as current, which is worse, because there is nothing on screen to tell you the information is old.

The 60 to 90 Second Pattern

Two reviewers, on two different platforms, describe the same interval and both attribute it to an update.

after recent update, June 26 why so glichy? Same issue as some others I see posting, locations are not real time and jump all over. no longer following people in my circle real time it updates after 60-90 seconds without realtime movement.

I used to be able to follow along the route, now it updates about every 60-90 seconds and jumps around. Location no longer accurate. Started with update.

Others describe the same behaviour without naming a number:

the last month this app has been extremely unreliable. not all locations are picked up. there is a major lag of anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour on departure and arrivals.

The location does not update until they are gone from the area.

Person riding in the same car, arrives at home at the same time as the driver and shows that they arrived 2 minutes later from each other.

That last one is the cleanest test in the whole set. Two phones in the same car, same journey, same arrival, two minutes apart on screen. Whatever is producing the delay is happening per device, not per location.

What People Tried, and What Happened

Ranked by how often the attempt appears in these 146 reviews:

• Reinstall, log out, clear cache. The most common attempt and the most commonly reported failure. One reviewer reinstalled and then could not get back in at all: "I've logged out , Uninstaller, reinstalled then had problems logging back in." Another reports it across the whole group: "clear cache, delete reinstall…nothing fixed it and it’s happening for everyone in the circle".

• Restart every phone in the circle. Reported as a repeated ritual rather than a fix: "I have lost count of the number of times everyone in our group has been forced to restart their devices."

• Check permissions and battery settings. This is the advice the app itself gives, and it is genuinely relevant on Android, where aggressive battery optimisation does suppress background location. But reviewers report complying and getting nagged anyway, which is covered in the next section.

• Keep the phone charged. One reviewer reports this as the developer's own advice, and why it did not apply: "The app does not work as stated. Location tracking is delayed or frozen for 4 days. The developer's advice to "keep the battery full" is useless since my phone is always charged."

No reviewer in this set of 146 reports a setting they changed that restored real-time updates. If your location is stale and permissions are already granted, nothing in this data suggests there is a fix on your end.

The Permission Nag Loop (13.8% of Android complaints)

11 Android reviews are about being asked for permissions and battery exemptions repeatedly, including after granting them. This is a distinct complaint from accuracy, and it is the second-largest Android cluster.

The battery optimization notification is incredibly annoying. Every single time I tap on one of my kids in the app, the same "Optimize Battery" warning pops up.

it's said to turn off a battery optimizations,i already turn off everything on my phone settings but it keeps saying that.

Worked fine without granting all permissions, but now your location will not update for your friends or family unless you allow Life360 to take your soul.

it's obnoxious with it's "reminders" to give it more permissions

The underlying request is legitimate. A background location app on Android really does need battery optimisation disabled to report reliably. What reviewers object to is that the prompt does not appear to check whether the setting has already been changed, so complying does not stop it.

Does Paying Fix It?

This is the question the reviews answer most clearly, and the answer is no. Accuracy complaints from paying subscribers appear across both platforms and every tier.

i pay for the gold membership and recently the app crashes, does not notify when arrived or leaving, glitches, show person is not at exact location when they all.

I'm having trouble with accurate location. It worked gr8 but since getting Premium it's all over the place.

Frequent drops in tracking between iOS and android devices. Very frustrating when I’m paying for the GOLD subscription

I’ve had a paid subscription for one week and the app has never worked properly. It wasn’t tracking for a few days, and still doesn’t send notifications when my child leaves/arrives at specified places.

for a paid safety app, its location accuracy and delays are unacceptable. Locations jump around or show "last updated 45 min ago." yet Google Maps provides consistent uninterrupted precise tracking.

What paying does change is what you can see, and reviewers report the boundary moving.

when I try to scroll through the history, it says "your plan includes just 2 days of location history" but it only shows 2 hours, which is really frustrating.

the location history feature is broken. Anytime I try to click back to the previous day it prompts me to upgrade my plan.

up until a few days ago i could set it for notifications when they arrived or left a place, now it wants more many to do that

Mislead paying for gold, it only covers one circle but they don't tell you that. they want you to buy a subscription for each circle.

That last one is the most expensive misunderstanding in the set and it is worth stating plainly: a paid plan covers one circle. If you keep separate circles for, say, your children and your parents, reviewers report the subscription does not span both.

Crash Detection That Did Not Fire

4 reviews in this set describe a real collision in which the app sent no alert. Four out of 146 is a small number and these are user accounts rather than verified incidents, so treat them as reports, not as a measured failure rate. They are included because crash detection is the feature the paid tiers are sold on, and because all four describe the same outcome.

I have had the paid app thinking if something happens I will get notified. my wife got into a bad accident and I was never alerted.

the app was tracking his ride to work as I have the history so the app was on and working. There was no dispatched emergency vehicles no police notified, no family alerts. Nothing.

my daughter got in a car accident. She was going 75 miles an hour, hydroplaned and bounced from one side of the freeway to the other, like a ping-pong ball on the concrete barriers. The car has significant front end and side damage, and every single airbag was deployed. Life360 didn’t notify anybody!

My husband got into a bad car accident and life 360 didn’t alert us or never showed he was in an accident.

The second and third reviewers both say they verified their settings afterwards and found crash detection enabled and permissions granted. Whatever the explanation, the practical takeaway for anyone relying on this feature is the same: do not treat silence from the app as evidence that nothing happened.

Ads in a Safety App (5.0% Android, 3.0% iOS)

A smaller cluster, but one review in it describes a consequence no other complaint in this article comes close to.

Every app has ADS, but PLEASE add an option to CLOSE it. Or, create a page for the ADS...if someone is interested, they have an option to view all. Or, freakin move the AD....as it appears right above my daughters 'bubble'. In panic mode, trying to locate her... I kept hitting the FREAKIN AD!!

too many ads now it's become almost useless. I can't even see my list of circle members at the bottom of the screen because some add card pops up and covers up the list.

Been a long time user of app and they seem to add more and more ads. Annoying when you try to click on your kids location and some game app pops up instead.

An ad unit placed next to the tap target you reach for in an emergency is a design decision, not a bug, and it is the one thing in this article that could be changed this week.

Billing, Trials and Cancellation

9 reviews across the two platforms are about money rather than location: trials that convert without warning, a price revealed only at the end of setup, and cancellations that did not stop the charges.

takes you all the way through the setup you invite all your family to join only then it tells you that you will be charged £9.99 /month

I had tried out the 7 day free trial of the gold membership it later expired but I was challenged to cancel it and was not able to then it has charged my card

the service was not needed and I cancelled it within the first week. after looking at my acco unt I still have money taken out to pay for the service I cancelled.

I signed up for a 6 month free trial and it will not work. When I contacted support I was told it was escalated to their teams with no timeframe.

If you are trying to stop a Life360 charge, the subscription is billed through the App Store or Google Play, which means cancelling inside the app is not what stops it. Our Life360 cancellation and refund guide walks through the store-level steps for both platforms.

The Same Failures in Six Other Languages

Non-English reviews for the same app describe the same two clusters, accuracy and the battery nag, in the same words.

Italian

È un'ottima app, ma dall'ultimo aggiornamento fa fatica a dare la posizione in tempo reale. Non si capisce il motivo. I dispositivi sono entrambi carichi di batteria e hanno segnale, ma la posizione è ferma a 5 /10 e a volte anche 20 minuti prima.

Polish

lokalizacja się zacina na środku drogi na długi czas, przychodzą powiadomienia że wyszło się z domu lub do niego wróciło bez ruszenia się z miejsca, w tamtym roku aplikacja działała bez zarzutów a teraz już nie do końca

Spanish

antes si daba ubicación en tiempo real ahora marca que uno de los integrantes está en cierto lugar desde fechas pasadas y no es cierto.

Turkish

son güncellemede çok kötü oldu ilk kullandığımda her olayı anlık gorebiliyordum şimdi zaman sapmaları bulunduğu konum yanlış bir çok konum zaman hatası var lütfen düzeltin

Portuguese

o app mostra que a pessoa tá de carro sendo que ela está de bicicleta

German

in der Stadt funktioniert die App ganz gut, aber sobald ich mit dem Hund im Feld oder Wald unterwegs bin wird der Standort nicht mehr aktualisiert!

French

Chiant à m’harceler pour l'économiseur de batterie. Même quand je le désactive je reçois des notifs pour me demander de le retirer.

Italian

dovete togliere la notifica che devo cambiare le mie impostazioni sul risparmio della batteria

Arabic

التطبيق ليس مجاني ويعطيك تجربة لمدة اسبوع فقط وبعد ذلك يحتاج ميزانية مكلفة للاستمرار فيه

Two of these add detail the English set does not. The German reviewer identifies where it fails, which is away from towns rather than in them. The Italian reviewer rules out the two usual explanations in advance: both devices charged, both with signal, position stuck up to twenty minutes behind.

The Full Breakdown

Each review is counted once, in the priority order shown.

Google Play, 80 reviews:

App Store, 66 reviews:

What We Did Not Count

4 iOS reviews and 3 Android reviews are objections to being tracked at all, mostly from teenagers, and we did not count them as defects. The app is doing exactly what it advertises in those cases.

And yeah, us teens just LOVE being watched by our parents 24/7

this app is less for tracking kids than it is for wives tracking their husband

They are worth reading anyway if you are deciding whether to install it, because they describe the cost side of the trade rather than a fault. For a fuller view of that trade, including the store's own age rating, see the Life360 parent guide.

We also did not count battery drain complaints as accuracy problems even though they are related. Three Android reviewers report heavy drain, and that is the direct cost of the background location precision everyone else is asking for.

What To Do Right Now

• Check the timestamp, not the dot. The most dangerous failure in this set is stale data shown as current. Tap the person to see when their location was last updated before acting on it.

• On Android, disable battery optimisation for Life360 once and confirm it stuck. It genuinely matters for background reporting, and the app's own prompt is unreliable at detecting whether you have already done it.

• Verify the whole circle, not just your phone. Reviewers repeatedly find one member reporting late while everyone else is fine, which points at that device's settings rather than the service.

• Do not rely on crash detection as your only alert path. Four separate reviewers describe real accidents with no notification. Treat it as a bonus, not as coverage.

• If you pay, know what your plan covers. One subscription covers one circle, and location history limits are enforced tighter than the plan description suggests, according to multiple reviewers.

• Cancel through the store, not the app. Charges continue after in-app cancellation attempts in several reports.

The Bottom Line

Life360 rates 4.50 on Google Play and 4.79 on the App Store, and most of its hundred million installs never generate a complaint. What these 146 reviews describe is narrower: an app whose core promise is real-time location, currently reporting on a delay that reviewers put at 60 to 90 seconds or worse, with the largest complaint cluster on both platforms pointing at the same thing.

Everything else in this article, the paywall boundaries, the permission nagging, the ad next to the child's icon, matters more than it otherwise would for one reason. This is a product people buy for the moments when the answer needs to be right the first time.

Read the current 1-3 star reviews yourself on the Life360 review page, check the code-computed trust summary at is Life360 legit, or compare the iOS listing, where the same app rates 0.29 stars higher.

Related reading: Life360, Find My, Google, Glympse and Find My Kids Ranked compares the family location apps by complaint volume, Apps That Drain Your Battery Most covers the cost of background location, and T-Life Limited Access Error looks at another app people rely on for family device tracking.