Protego

Protego is a family locator for iPhone and Android, built on a simple hunch: if the map is fun, kids will want it, and a family map everyone wants brings people closer instead of keeping them under watch.

Open it and your people are on a hand-drawn parchment map, each in a little frame of their own (a photo, or a creature in a wizard's hat), with footprints trailing behind whoever is on the move. Your teenager chose the fox. Grandad went for the owl and is taking the long way home from the shops. Kids open it on their own, to see where everyone is and who is on the way home, and that is the point: it becomes something the family shares, not something done to the youngest.

It isn't only for families: friends share it to see who's already at the party, and couples use it when one of them is travelling. Whoever can see you, you can see too.

Here is the part that sounds small and isn't. Every Protego circle runs both ways: if you can see your daughter, she can see you. There is no hidden mode and no setting for watching someone who can't watch back. Researchers who study teenagers have found, for more than twenty years, that parents learn most of what they know from what their kids choose to tell them, not from checking up on them. A tracker a teenager resents quietly closes that door. A map she can use too keeps it open. She checks whether you've left work before asking what's for dinner, spots you passing the shop and asks for snacks, and the app turns into a family habit instead of a family argument. That's gentle parenting in app form: the line is drawn in the open, it applies to everyone, and nobody in the house is the only suspect.

The places that matter can be marked as wards, so you hear when someone gets home instead of texting "where are you?" into the dark.

We never sell location data or pass it to brokers. Protego is free to download and free for a circle of two. The paid plan brings in the rest of the family, along with place alerts, and it is the whole business.

What it isn't: a spy app, a message reader or a crash detector. If you need to read a child's messages or lock a phone down, this isn't that tool, and we'd rather say so.