Family Locator & Safety App
FamilyCircle. Family safety that stays in the family.
A self-hosted Life360 alternative for Android. Share live location, get smart place alerts, call each other with two-way video, and trigger an SOS the whole circle sees instantly — all running on a server your family owns, not a data broker's cloud.
Real Safety Tools, Not Just Dots on a Map
Live location, smart alerts, SOS, and video calling — built on a relay the family runs itself, with no company account and nothing to subscribe to.
Live Family Map
See everyone in your circle on a shared map in real time. Location updates adapt to movement — frequent while driving, sparse while still — to respect battery. The map runs on self-hosted map tiles, so even the map imagery isn't phoning home to a commercial provider.
Places & Smart Alerts
Mark the places that matter — home, school, a grandparent's house — and get notified when a family member arrives or leaves. Alerts are designed to break through silent mode and Do Not Disturb. Conditions make alerts meaningful instead of noisy: arrival-only, departure-only, or both; time windows like a "School" place that only alerts on departure between 8am–3pm; day restrictions for school days or weekends; and after-hours rules like "left home after 9pm."
One-Tap SOS / Panic
A prominent SOS button instantly alerts the entire circle with your live location attached, bypassing all normal place logic. A 5-second "tap to cancel" countdown prevents accidental pocket triggers while keeping it effectively one tap in a real emergency. SOS alerts reach family members even if the app was closed on their phone.
Two-Way Video Calling
Call any family member with live two-way video for emergencies or a quick check-in — a real video call, not a walkie-talkie. Calls connect peer-to-peer when possible and fall back to a self-hosted relay when both phones are on cellular, so they work over the public internet, not just Wi-Fi.
Arrival ETA / "On My Way"
Share a live ETA toward a destination — a saved place or any point dropped on the map. Everyone in the circle sees "12 min away" update in real time, and it clears automatically on arrival. ETAs use real road routing from a self-hosted routing engine, with a straight-line fallback.
Battery Awareness
Every member's battery level is shared alongside their location, so you can see at a glance if someone's phone is about to die — context that matters when you can't reach them.
Honest Presence
FamilyCircle tells you when it genuinely doesn't know where someone is — phone off, killed, or out of signal — instead of showing a stale pin as if it were live. "We're not sure, last confirmed 2h ago" is a trust feature most commercial trackers lack.
Easy Setup & Pairing
One person creates the family circle; everyone else joins by scanning a QR code, with a typed code as a fallback. No sign-ups, no email, no accounts to manage.
Crash Detection
An optional feature that watches for the signature of a possible car crash — a hard impact while moving at speed, followed by a sudden stop. If detected, the phone shows a full-screen "are you OK?" prompt with a 30-second countdown; if you don't cancel, an SOS with your location sends automatically. It's deliberately conservative and asks for confirmation rather than crying wolf. This feature is experimental and is not a certified life-safety device.
Your Family. Your Server. Full Stop.
No accounts. No subscription. No tracking.
Commercial family trackers monetize the most sensitive data there is: where your family lives, works, and sleeps. FamilyCircle is built the opposite way — the app talks only to a relay server the family runs itself, so location data never touches a third party.
- Self-hosted relay: the only server involved is the family's own — no company account, ever.
- End-to-end-capable encryption: modern elliptic-curve key agreement and AEAD primitives protect shared data.
- Explicit consent gate: the app requires accepting a clear disclosure of exactly what it collects before it will run at all.
- Self-hosted everything else: map tiles, routing (OSRM), and video relay (TURN) all run on infrastructure the family owns.
FamilyCircle is an early self-hosted project under active development. It is not a certified emergency or life-safety device — SOS and crash detection are aids, not guarantees.
Core Features
Built for Peace of Mind
Everything a family needs to stay connected and safe, without the surveillance business model.
Includes live shared map, conditional geofenced alerts, arrival ETA, battery sharing, honest staleness reporting, and QR pairing with no sign-up required.