How to Track Phone Location for Free [2025]

The ability to track a phone’s location is crucial, whether it concerns the safety of loved ones or the location of a lost or stolen device. As such, it is highly recommended to familiarize yourself with reliable methods for pinpointing the location of a mobile phone.

This updated guide for 2025 will walk you through various ways to track a device’s location for free. It will cover native methods built into modern smartphones and highlight a reliable third-party phone location tracker called FamiGuard Pro.

Why Is It Important to Track Phone Location in 2025?

There are various reasons why tracking a phone’s location is necessary. Some of the most compelling reasons include:

1. Ensuring Child Safety: As a parent, you need to track your child’s device’s location to know their whereabouts, ensure they get to and from school safely, and familiarize yourself with the areas they visit to ensure their safety.
2. Finding a Lost or Stolen Phone: Tracking down a misplaced, lost, or stolen device is one of the most common reasons for tracking phone location. It can help you avoid losing crucial information and incurring device replacement costs.
3. Keeping Seniors Safe: As an adult caring for a senior family member with dementia and similar conditions, tracking their location can help you locate them if they get lost or separated from you in public places.
4. Emergency Situations: In emergencies like road accidents, getting lost outdoors, or a person going missing, their phone’s live location can help guide first responders to where they are.
5. Travel and Navigation Convenience: If you want to shorten your commute or manage field or delivery employees, tracking phone location is crucial for optimizing routes and streamlining logistics.
6. Coordinating with Family and Friends: Tracking phone location can help you know where someone is, whether for meeting up or transparency with family and friends.

3 Ways to Track Phone Location Conveniently

Now that we understand how crucial tracking phone location is, we can explore some methods for knowing a mobile device’s exact location.

1. Built-In Location Features

Android and iOS devices have built-in location tracking features that conveniently show you a device’s whereabouts and location history.

a)  iOS Devices: Find My and Significant Locations

Find My is an iOS app that allows users to share their location with loved ones and track the location of linked devices when lost or misplaced. On the other hand, Significant Locations is a built-in feature that logs a user’s iPhone location history and stores it locally to share with other apps like Maps and Calendar.

To use Find My to track a device’s location, follow the steps below.

1. Tap to open the Settings app on the target iPhone.
2. Tap on the User’s Name → Find My → Turn on Find My.
3. Enable Share My Location.
4. Log in to the user’s iCloud from another device or use the Find My app to see their phone’s location.

Significant Locations can be enabled and used to track an iPhone’s location as follows:

1. On the target device, go to Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services.
2. Scroll down to System Services → Significant Locations.
3. Key in the user’s passcode.
4. Access the full history of visited places and dates.

Find My and Significant Locations require you to repeatedly log into your child’s or target user’s iCloud account or access their device to track their location. In the case of Significant Locations, it only shows where someone has been, not their live location.

b)  Android Devices: Location History via Google Maps

You can also know an Android device’s location history if the target phone is signed into a Google account, has enabled location services and history, and is connected to the internet.

Follow the steps below to track an Android phone’s location for free.

1. Open Settings on the target device → Google → Location → Turn Location ON.
2. Tap on Location History → Enable it for the target Google account.
3. Go to Google Maps Timeline on any browser.
4. Sign in with the same Google account signed into the target device.
5. A timeline view with historical data of visited places, routes, and timestamps will be displayed.

The downside to this approach for tracking the location of an Android device is that it must be connected to the internet. You must also have login credentials for the Google account linked to the phone you are monitoring.

2. Reverse Phone Number Lookup

Reverse phone number lookup services are another option for tracking a phone’s location in 2025. These websites feature a thorough database of contact information for various people categorized according to their city of residence. As such, you can conveniently track the location of a device linked to someone’s phone number.

So, how can you use this method to track a phone’s location? The process below simplifies it.

1. Select a reverse phone number lookup platform.
2. Sign up for an account if necessary.
3. Go to the search bar → Enter the target person’s phone number and other required information.
4. Run the search.
5. The website will show you publicly available information on the target person, including their registered home or office address.

Reverse phone number lookup websites rely on government documents and other information in the public domain, such as people’s social media accounts. This limits the accuracy of the information you can get about a phone’s location. Instead of the real-time location of the device, these platforms show you the registered official residence or workplace of a person, where they are likely to be found.

3. FamiGuard Pro- Reliable Third-Party Phone Location Tracker

Third-party phone location tracking apps are another alternative for pinpointing where a device is. Among the numerous apps available online, one stands out the most, FamiGuard Pro. This all-in-one parental control app is the perfect digital assistant for modern parents looking for an innovative way to track their children’s whereabouts.

FamiGuard Pro’s phone location tracking feature allows you to view your child’s actual GPS address in real time. The information is displayed in map view format, showing the streets with longitude and latitude data available.

The app also auto-syncs your child’s location as they move from one place to another. That way, you can see the complete location history to keep up with their whereabouts.

Another innovative feature of FamiGuard Pro is geofencing, which allows you to designate zones where your kid can move freely, such as the daily route from home to school and back. The app sends you instant alerts whenever the child goes outside these safe zones.

Other FamiGuard Pro location-specific capabilities include Wi-Fi logging, which tracks all Wi-Fi networks the device connects to, a convenient search function, and data export.

Being a comprehensive parental control app, FamiGuard Pro extends beyond phone location tracking to SMS and call, screen time, and social media monitoring. All these aspects of your child’s device can be monitored conveniently through a remote dashboard without raising any alarm or distorting normal phone functions.

How to Get Started with FamiGuard Pro

FamiGuard Pro is a simple-to-use parental control app that you can set up in less than five minutes without rooting or jailbreaking. Below is a step-by-step process to help you get started.

1. Visit the official FamiGuard website to sign up for a free account.
2. Select and pay for your preferred paid subscription.
3. Follow the automatic prompts to download and configure FamiGuard on the target device.
4. Log in to your online dashboard and start tracking the target phone location around the clock.

Is It Legal to Track A Phone’s Location?

Tracking someone’s phone location is highly frowned upon when you do not obtain their explicit consent. Therefore, it is recommended that you request permission from your employees or family members before tracking their location.

Transparency about why you want to track their location, such as for route optimization, ensuring safety, or for swift response during emergencies, helps build trust and ensures you can track their location without breaching any privacy laws.

It is worth noting that FamiGuard Pro, despite its comprehensive monitoring features, is strictly designed for legal use, such as parental control.

Conclusion

For all the numerous reasons why you need to track a phone’s location, it is more important to have the right tools. Most built-in location tracking and history features on iOS and Android devices are limited in their scope, creating the need for a more robust solution.

FamiGuard is a comprehensive parental control app with powerful location tracking features. It enables modern parents to know their children’s exact location in real-time and keep up with any movements they make. Visit the FamiGuard website today for more information and to view a free demo of the app.