Where is my child: how location works in parental controls

"Where now" asks the phone for a fresh point

The "Where now" button sends a request to the child's phone, and a fresh point appears on the map a few seconds later. You do not wait for the next scheduled update.

Two details next to that point usually matter more than the coordinates. First, accuracy, shown as something like ±25 m, meaning the phone sits somewhere inside that radius. Second, the battery level at the moment of the point: if your child is not answering and the last point says 4 %, you already have your answer.

When a place has a name, the list shows the name — "School" instead of a pair of numbers.

History: 6 hours, a day, three days or a week

The route history opens for a chosen period: 6 hours, 1 day, 3 days, 1 week. There is no longer range in the app, and in practice none is needed — a parent's question is almost always about yesterday or this morning.

Inside the period you see points with timestamps. That answers a different question than "where now": it shows how the day went. When they left home, how long they stayed at school, when they started back.

Zones: home, school, grandma

A zone is a circle on the map with a name and a radius. The usual three: home, school, and grandma or a club.

Each zone can send alerts: notify when the child enters and notify when the child leaves. You stop checking the map, because the map tells you when something happens.

A practical detail taken straight from the app: a radius under 100 meters is less reliable, because GPS accuracy in a city rarely does better. The app warns you about it while you set the zone up. For a school, 150–200 meters usually works: with a tighter circle a phone sitting in the far wing of the building keeps entering and leaving the zone.

A zone you do not need right now does not have to be deleted. Switch it off and it stays saved, it simply stops sending alerts.

The home zone and outdoor time

One zone can be marked as home. That is not about alerts: the child's app has an outdoor goal, and stars for it are awarded when the phone leaves the home zone and comes back.

Without a marked home zone the outdoor goal has nothing to measure against, so it will not work.

The SOS button

A separate mechanic: when the child presses SOS, the coordinates arrive inside the notification itself. The map opens on the point, so there is nothing to search for.

Where the limits are

Half of the disappointment with parental controls comes from expectations that were never true, so here it is plainly.

Location works on Android only. Gardion does not run on iPhone at all, and we say so both in the app and in our FAQ.

The "Allow all the time" location permission is required. If the child's app is set to "only while using the app", points stop arriving as soon as the app goes to the background. That is how Android itself works.

Accuracy depends on the place. Dense blocks and building interiors widen the GPS radius, and that is exactly why the zone warning exists.

Battery savers put apps to sleep. On some Android skins, Xiaomi in particular, background apps get dropped from memory and points arrive less often: the app needs autostart allowed and the background restriction removed.