PearCircle

PearCircle shares live location with family or friends, free, with no account and no company in the middle. You make a circle, invite people with a link or QR code, and locations sync straight between the phones in it.

There is no paid tier and nothing held back for one. Unlimited circles, unlimited saved places, no upgrade prompt and no trial. Location apps normally have to pay for a server somewhere, and that cost comes back to you as either a subscription or advertising. PearCircle has no server, so it has neither, and there is no version of it where your family's movements become someone's revenue.

It handles places and geofences, so everyone in a circle gets a notification when someone arrives at or leaves a saved location, worked out on the device rather than by a server. It also does trips, motion state, battery level and last-seen times, and a one-tap pause that hides your location without leaving people looking at a stale dot. Map tiles cache for offline use, and tile requests are stateless coordinate fetches that do not identify you.

On Android it falls back to the platform location provider when Play Services is absent, so it works on de-Googled phones.

It syncs peer to peer, with every update signed by the device that wrote it. If you want a circle to stay available when phones are asleep, an optional blind seeder runs on your own hardware, including as an Umbrel app, and it cannot read your locations.

Because there is no server holding a connection open, a geofence notification can take around thirty seconds to reach other devices while someone is moving, and longer on iOS. That is the trade the design makes.