There can be many instances where you need to find a cell phone location by cell phone number. For example, your phone might get stolen, and it would be great if you can track the location of your phone. Or you want to know your kid’s where about who supposed to be with her friends.
There can be many such reasons when you feel whether it’s actually possible to track someone’s phone by using their number. Well, tracking a cellphone’s location isn’t easy for regular people like us.
Police and other law enforcement people can track any third-party mobile location very easily as they got advanced equipment, latest technology, and most importantly, active support from the network service provider company.
Needless to say that we are not privileged to have access to such things; hence, it will be hard for you to track anybody’s cellphone location. Having said that, it’s not entirely “impossible” to follow a third-party mobile location, provided you can physically access that phone at least once.
There are a few apps in the market that can track a smartphone’s location actively if you can get them installed in the target device. In this article, we are going to talk about seven free apps that you can install on a smartphone and track the location of the phone without any hassle.
So, without wasting any further time, let’s find out which is the best free cell phone tracker app out of these seven. All of them are free; however, some can have a free trial offer, and a paid subscription plan as well with more premium features.
7 Apps to Track a cell phone location for free
Find My Device (Android)
Unless you’re living in a cage for the last few years, or you’re using an Android that’s few years old, you already know Google’s “Find my Device” feature, which is a built-in app in almost all modern Android devices. With this features, you can track the location of a phone without install software. So, in case you misplace your phone or somebody steals it, you can start tracking the device’s location from any other phone or computer. If you just misplaced it anywhere in your home or at a nearby place, you can send a command to ring the phone.
Or in the worst-case scenario, if it gets stolen, then can give the location information to the police for them to find it out easily, or you can lock and erase the phone completely to make sure nobody can open the phone or get their hands on your personal photos or documents.
However, to get the benefit of this specific feature in your Android, it must be enabled before you lost it; otherwise, it can’t be enabled remotely.
There are some conditions as well to make this feature work – the lost phone must be switched on, connected to the internet, the GPS on the phone must be enabled, and you must have access to the same Google account of that device.
Glympse
Did you ever feel the need to send your exact location to somebody so that they can reach to you effortlessly? Maybe you’re meeting up with some friends in a new coffee bar where you were never before, and you want to share your GPS location with your friends so that they can find you.
Not everybody is a pro telling exact direction, or sometimes there can be mobile network issues or any other unforeseen circumstances when you really wish to have such a feature on your smartphone.
There’s an app which aims to solve this exact problem, and it’s called Glympse. It’s a third-party app that’s available for download from both Android’s play store and iPhone’s app store.
It’s an app that can share your GPS location with anybody you choose to. Basically what this app does is it sends a message to another person’s cellphone (or multiple people, if you want) that includes your GPS location, distance from their place, estimated time of travel along with the traffic condition on the way.
Find My iPhone on iCloud
As the name suggests, it’s Apple’s version of Android’s “Find My Device” feature, and it works exactly the same way except for a few differences. This feature is available for basically every Apple device, be it an iPhone or iPad or a Macbook or even an Apple watch.
And just like Google’s Find my Device, this feature should be enabled before you lose your iPhone; otherwise, you’re on your own without any help from this feature. But the good news is, you don’t have to set it up by yourself. It comes as enabled by default with your new iPhone, and unless you go all the way to the settings option to deactivate it, you’re protected already.
So, how it helps you in case, you misplace your i-device? You can remotely locate your iPhone with exact GPS coordinates, can play a ringtone (to help you find the device if it’s nearby), can enable “activation lock,” and can factory reset the phone while erasing all the sensitive information and content on the device.
It has a unique feature named “family sharing,” by which another family member of yours can immediately start locating your device once you realize it has been lost.
GPSWOX – Family Locator GPS Tracker
Family locator by gpswox. com is an award-winning location tracking app with some very useful features that make it one of the best alternatives to the in-built tracking apps.
It is compatible with both Android and iPhone, all the features work cross-device; hence, you can track an iPhone’s location from an Android or vice versa. Let’s have a quick look at some of its wonderful features.
Like all location tracking apps, it can track the location of the target phone in real-time with high accuracy. You also can set customized alerts for events like when your kids are entering the school premises, and when they are leaving. If the device’s battery is low, you’ll get an alert for that too, along with the current GPS location.
If you’re worried about your kid’s habit of overspeeding the car, you can set an alert for that – so that whenever the vehicle crosses a certain speed limit, you get a notification on your phone. There’s another interesting feature as well that lets you challenge any of your family members to achieve a pre-set step goal.
Though this last one has no direct connection with tracking a cellphone, it’s a nice thing to have. The best part is this app is freely available for you to install, with paid monthly plans according to your requirements.
Life360
Life360 is a solid contender in this list of location tracking apps for free with a lot of exciting features. It has both free and paid versions, and the features it offers are simply incredible, to say the least.
It shares the phone’s GPS location with you, along with the ETA from your place in case you want to reach that location. It monitors the battery percentage and alerts you in case of low charge so that you know that the target device can get switched off soon, and you won’t get to track it once it goes off.
There is an option where you can set several customized alerts, and it can send you a special “help alert” in case the device holder in any danger. For the people who keep worrying about their children when they are not around, this app can be considered a life-saver.
And all these features are available for you in the free version, you won’t have to pay a cent ever to keep it using as long as you wish. The paid version has some more premium features, such as car crash detection, roadside assistance, and driver report.
However, you can access them only if you’re in the USA, those options are not available worldwide, and no point buying the premium version in that case.
Geozilla
This one app is definitely a next-level thing; it goes far beyond being a location tracking app. Till now, we were talking about apps that are meant to track locating human beings with smartphones.
Geozilla. com does that with pinpoint accuracy, and it follows your pets as well. You can pair this app with a compatible pet tracker to know when it jumped out of your fence, and where it went, the activity level, and many other things.
This app can be installed in smartphones (Android and iPhone), Apple watches, and in your favorite Fitbit trackers too. The Fitbit pairing option is not available at this moment, though, but it will come with a feature update very soon as their official website says.
With this new Fitbit pairing feature, you will be able to track a person’s heart rate and other physical signs remotely sitting at your home. That means tracking the wellbeing of an elderly person has just been a lot easier when they are outside.
Along with these unique benefits, this app comes with all sorts of usual tracking options, like real-time location sharing, location history access up to two weeks, scheduler alert, emergency safety alert, etc.
The only con of this app is they don’t offer any free version, but only a limited trial period of 7 days, and then you’ll have to subscribe for either a quarterly ($49.99) or a yearly plan ($77.99) which are pretty low considering the features and versatility it offers.
NEXSPY
We are not sure if it’s fair to put this app in this article, because it seems we are comparing apples and oranges. NEXSPY is the best app to track a cell phone without permission, it’s a full-fledged phone monitoring app with plenty of features by which you can actively spy on every action of somebody on his/her phone in real-time.
It does track the location, of course, but the similarity ends there. Let’s have a quick look at what you can do with NEXSPY other than tracking a cellphone’s location –
Full-featured parental control
NEXSPY is a fully capable parental control app that offers features like monitoring call logs, message logs, contact lists, email, iMessage, third-party messaging apps like WhatsApp, Messenger, browsing activity, bookmarks, app installation, and more. You can track someone’s phone without them knowing from a separate account dashboard that you can access from any PC or mobile device. You can choose to receive real-time updates for each and every option mentioned above, or you can check them inside your dashboard at your own convenience.
Invisible app with a stealth operation mode
As we told you already, NEXSPY is not about tracking location only, it’s much more than that. We know how our kids behave when they know that they are being tracked by their parents with an app installed on their phone, right?
What they do is switch the phone off, jeopardizing the whole purpose of tracking their location. With NEXSPY, you can rest assured that even your kids won’t be able to find out that they are being monitored as it runs in completely stealth mode, and it’s impossible to find out (hence to uninstall) by a user unless he/she knows it’s there.
Now you can track their location, monitor who they are talking to, what kind of messages they are receiving or sending, what websites they are opening – all of them without giving them even the slightest hint, now how cool is that?
Ambient monitoring
Do you want to listen to what your kids are saying, to whom they are talking to, which place they at the very moment – even when they are not using the phone? You can remotely turn the phone’s microphone on to listen to their conversation with others or the sound of surroundings even when the phone is in idle state.
Well, you may think that this is something straight from spy-thriller, and you’re going a little overboard, but you can’t be cautious enough when it comes to the safety of your own kids, right?
Read more: How to Track My Child’s Phone Without Them Knowing?
Our recommendation: Best app to Track a cell phone location
As you can imagine that NEXSPY can’t be a free app obviously, it does come with surprisingly affordable subscription plans.
You can have all of its benefits for as little as $19 every month (yearly plan), which makes it a no-brainer option for those who don’t want to take any risk with the safety and security of their loved ones.
For everybody else who needs only a location tracker, any free app listed above will do the job without hurting your wallet.
