Hi everyone! We’re so excited to let you know that a new version of the app is live in the App Store!

Version 6.0.2 addresses many of the issues that came up with iOS7:

• Improved location experience for iOS7! We’re working hard to clear up issues introduced by Apple’s software update.
• Smarter notifications and troubleshooting: Especially for disconnected devices, we’re providing better information on why family members are not connected, and how to get them back.
• More than a dozen bug fixes around history, Premium access and more!

To be very clear, Life360 will not work on iPhones unless the app is left running in the background and location services are turned on. This is not a bug within Life360 — this is due to a structural change within iOS7, which fundamentally changed the way apps like ours work. Unless Apple rolls back or makes new changes to its system, we will not be able to get locations for iPhone users unless these two criteria are met.

We would also like to thank everyone who has been so patient while we worked on these fixes… we appreciate you, and we know it’s been a frustrating month since the operating system came out.

We are available on Twitter, Facebook or our support forums if you need further assistance.

Thanks again, you guys are awesome!

This summer my family and I moved from Philadelphia to Atlanta. The move may have been our longest, but it wasn’t our first. I can remember the sheer panic that I felt when my daughter was little and we moved a few short miles away from the only home she had ever known. I asked myself all sorts of questions: how will she adjust, will our new place feel like home and should we send her with her grandparents or keep her with us while we move all the stuff?

In short: always send the kids with someone else while you move. I couldn’t imagine having a then five-year-old with us between dressers and mirrors and what felt like an avalanche of boxes. Of course it’s doable, but if you can heave-ho.

We made sure that the absolute first thing we did was get our daughter’s room setup: our friends went from moving furniture to dipping paint brushes in “Buzz Lightyear Blue” and rolling the stuff onto her bedroom walls. While it dried, all of us went about tending to the rest of the house. The next morning, and after the paint was dry, I hung clothes and pictures, arranged stuffed animals and pulled the sheets tight.

When our daughter pulled up with Grandmom, she was thrilled. A blue room with stars and her name on the wall in glittery purple letters? Oh yeah, she loved it.

It turns out that I had needlessly panicked.

After six years, another paint change and two furniture re-arrangements later, it was time for Atlanta. This move brought its own set of challenges; mainly the 16-hour drive. Ugh. But now our daughter was ten and really understood that moving meant a complete change: a new school, friends, house, and way of life. Despite knowing that my motherly panic was unnecessary before, I went ahead and did it all over again. How would she adjust? Would she want to go back “home?”  What if she never made a friend? Would the kids be cruel to the new kid?

Of course she fit right in to her new way of life and she did it with fewer complaints than the bona fide adults she gets to call Mom and Dad. See we – that would be me and her father—took to complaining to each other about the food, our inability to find anything, and the unrealistic expectation that a bunch of magical fairies would come and remove all the boxes and put our things away while we slept. Our daughter took everything in stride and made the most out of our move while we spent our time getting familiar with a new zip code.

That’s the thing about our kids; they always surprise us even when we know they’re just wonderful, mini versions of the best we have to offer. Our daughter still hasn’t complained or looked back or second-guessed. Every morning she puts one foot in front of the other and rubs the sleep from her eyes while grasping for her favorite cereal; just like she did before. After she’s done and dressed, she walks out the door ready to conquer the best day ever.

There’s a good chance that fall is your family’s favorite season. It’s a time to get outside and enjoy the cooler temperatures by heading to the pumpkin patch, giving thanks around the table and snuggling into the depths of your couch with a sweater and some hot coca. At a loss for what to do when the falling leaves turn from a trickle into a tumble and the weekends arrive and you have nothing planned? Here are 30 things to do this fall as a family.

1. Bake cookies (they don’t have to be from scratch) and deliver them to your neighbors in jazzed up Pringles cans. [Source]
2. Go apple picking at a local farm.
3. Make a sidewalk chalk portrait for your holiday card. [Source]
4. Every first weekend, Bank of America offers free admission to select museums around the country for card holders. [Source]
5. Check your downtown art museum for pay-what-you-wish admission.
6. Here’s 30 easy Halloween treats kids can make like a vampire bagel bite. [Source]
7. Go bowling.
8. Instead of lemonade, host an apple cider stand. And donate your earnings to charity.
9. Make a ghost refrigerator. [Source]
10. Have a family rubber ducky race in a shallow creek near your home.
11. Dedicate Fridays to “Fort Fridays” by making a fort and popping in a DVD and munching on popcorn.
12. Gather sticks, affix tiny labels and make a “giving thanks” tree. [Source]
13. Live near an airport? Hop on the hood of the car or pop the hatch of the minivan and check out the airplanes arriving and departing.
14. Grab a blindfold and play a round of “blind makeup” by letting the blindfolded person be the makeup artist. Now, switch.
15. Play “tourist” for a day and do the things that tourists would do in your downtown: take a carriage ride, explore the historical treasures and take loads of pictures.
16. Go on a ghost tour. Here’s how to do it for free in select city cities. [Source]
17. Make outdoor Halloween luminaries using brown lunch bags. [Source]
18. Be a secret inspiration by leaving “positive affirmation” cards like “be the change you seek” in library books or taped to a mirror in a public restrooms, etc.
19. Jump in that leaf pile already!
20. Bake some chocolate chip banana bread. Oh my. [Source]
21. Wow the classroom party with the easiest mini Frankenstein cups using Jell-O, a Sharpie and crumbled Oreos. [Source]
22. If you live on the coasts, go whale or dolphin watching.
23. Grab the kids and toilet paper dad’s car while he’s sleeping. Let him know “mummy” did it. Heh.
24. Play flashlight tag.
25. Create a family command center. Here’s 20 ideas. [Source]
26. Hit a thrift store and find hidden gems and re-purpose them as a family.
27. Make art out of melted crayons. [Source]
28. If you have a fire pit or a microwave, make some ‘smores and enjoy them outside with ghost stories.
29. Get started on the holidays with these 25 handmade gifts under $5. [Source]
30. Of course: you went to the pumpkin patch via hayride, right? Cool! Now, paint one pumpkin with black chalkboard paint and countdown the days to Halloween or Thanksgiving.

And most importantly, have fun out there!

A letter from Chris Hulls, to our iOS7 users:

Hi there,

I’m Life360’s co-founder and CEO, and I’m reaching out to you because either you or a family member are running Life360 on iOS7.

Since iOS7 was released, location updates have become unreliable for some users. This is unfortunately due to changes outside of our control. However, we are working with Apple to fix the major problems, and our team has been working around the clock to find solutions for others.

We have found that the majority of users who are having problems with iOS7 are experiencing them from intentional system changes made by Apple, not Life360 bugs. To keep location working properly, it is critical that you:

#1: Make sure all family members leave Life360 running in the background

If a family member “kills” Life360 by double tapping on the home button and removing the app from the tray, their location will not automatically update again until they manually restart the application.

#2 Check that everyone in your family has Background App Refresh and Location Services turned on

If you or a family member turns either of these settings off, Life360 will not be able update locations.

I would like to personally assure you that stability is a top priority for Life360 and we hope to release a new, improved version to you soon.

We appreciate your patience while we work out these iOS7 kinks.

If you have any questions, feel free to send me a note directly at chrishulls@life360.com

Thank you,

Chris

We are now officially living in the wearable device era. Welcome Galaxy Gear.

Samsung has entered the market and ushered us into a new category. While the concept has been talked about for years, this is the first major foray by a consumer electronics giant. And it’s a good one, though maybe not what everyone expected.

We are thrilled that Samsung has invited us to be a part of this first generation as one of the apps available on the first shipments of Galaxy Gear. It’s available around the globe, and available US carriers include AT&T, Sprint and Verizon.

We are very proud of the Life360 app, specially designed for the Galaxy Gear. We worked closely with Samsung to create a user experience specifically built with busy families in mind. We had to rethink the interface from the ground up and focus on our core mission – to keep families connected with each other. We designed the app with a few distinct screens that allow you to see the location of your family members, check in from your current location or send a panic alert, send a predefined message and call Live Advisor. The app also works with our latest feature called “Circles”.

Best of all, families can stay in sync with integrated notification from Life360. How many times have you been in a meeting or some official function where looking at your smartphone is not polite or socially acceptable? Now you can get important notifications with a slight vibration on your wrist and a quick note telling you, for example, that your child has arrived at home. That’s a nice feeling.

Galaxy Gear is truly a companion device and not a stand alone computer. It uses Bluetooth for all its communications, connecting to your Samsung phone and the internet. This means you can make phone calls while speaking to your watch while your phone is actually doing the heavy lifting tucked away in your pocket. Calling a Life360 Live Advisor on Galaxy Gear only takes a few taps, and moments later you can speak with a live operator directly from your watch.

There are some great security features built in as well, such as locking your smartphone screen when you move far away from your phone. Also, quite conveniently, when you are close to your phone, the presence of Galaxy Gear removes the need for swiping to unlock your phone. We can all live with one less swipe.

Galaxy Gear also allows some cool watch customization. For example, you can change the look of your watch (analog, digital) or the color of your background and text. Gear also allows you to customize the home screen by defining the presets of most used actions or apps. We really like how our logo looks on the watch. Not bad, right?

What are your thoughts about wearable tech?

Are you as excited as we are about this next generation of smart living?

Effective today, we are no longer offering a version of the Life360 app for the Blackberry operating system. We realize that this will not be a popular decision with our Blackberry users, but after careful consideration and research, we have realized that we need to dedicate those resources to quicker innovation and better support for our iPhone and Android apps.

If you have the app installed currently, it isn’t going to suddenly stop working or anything, but it will no longer be available in the Blackberry App World, and we will not be adding to or updating it.

The team at Life360 is always trying to provide our users with the best possible experience when using our app. We work hard to keep it streamlined and accurate, and try to add features that we get the most requests for, or things that we think will really improve our user experience.

And sometimes, we try something that doesn’t work out.

We truly wish we could provide the app on every platform, for every user, but the reality is that we can’t, so we need to focus on iOS and Android and make those the very best they can be.

We are currently concentrating on strengthening and optimizing the iOS and Android versions, so we are not working on any additional platforms at this time, (Blackberry or Windows) and I don’t, at this point, have any sort of timeline of if or when that might change.

Since we launched our first app in 2009, we have built a community that is nearly 50 million users strong. That’s 20 million families, covering the entire world, using Life360 to stay in touch and communicate easily.

We know that one of the things we’ve never offered before is the ability for a user to belong to multiple, individual families. Whether you have blended families, caregivers, extended family, even sports teams or just friends you see regularly, as your personal definition of “family” changes, so do your needs, especially how you use Life360.

That’s why I’m SO excited to tell you about the most exciting thing to come down the pipe since, well, ever!

“As we continue to grow, our team remains focused on how to extend and integrate the app into additional areas of everyday life for families. Our users have been telling us how they wish there was a way to stay connected with non-family members, such as friends, babysitters, dog walkers, Little League teams and more. Circles offers exactly what our users have asked for, with the ability to set custom privacy controls appropriate for each Circle, and will encourage more people to join and enjoy the convenience of using the Life360 app.”

- Chris Hulls, Founder and CEO, Life360

Our new Circles feature adds functionality that we’ve never had before; you can have Circles for your immediate family, those you are a caregiver for (maybe parents or grandparents), your kids can create Circles with their friends… the possibilities are endless!

Circles for teams, troops, and carpool? Sure! Circles for when you go to a crowded public event like a fair or sporting event? Perfect! Circles for the nanny, so they can check in while you’re at work? Excellent!

Also with the Circles function is the ability to turn location sharing off and on for yourself. You don’t always need to share your location with the kids’ carpool drivers, but the day that it’s your turn? Activate sharing in that Circle and the other parents will easily be able to see where you’re at for pick-up time!

We’re really excited to finally release this; our developers have been working late nights and weekends to get this out for both iPhone and Android, so be sure to update today!

What will YOU do with Circles?

Special thanks to guest blogger Jean Parks for writing this post about why she thinks Life360 is a good potential replacement for those who are concerned about Google’s recent announcement that they’re closing Google Latitude down on August 9.

Many of you who rely on Google Latitude may not know that the service is going to be discontinued by Google on August 9th, 2013. These changes will also impact 3rd party location apps that use the service. You won’t be able to share your location, your list of Latitude friends will disappear, there will be no more email check in’s or reminders. This is unsettling news for those who have come to rely on the service but it also presents the perfect opportunity to try an app that will suit your family needs even more closely. The Life360 app is an excellent replacement for Latitude users.

Locate – keep family safe

Life360 offers a world of convenience and peace of mind for families. Life360 uses state of the art GPS technology so you and the kids can locate each other quickly and reliably. Security is the developer’s utmost concern, you can rest easy knowing your family map and chat channels are locked away from prying eyes. Communication with kids is still the best safety tool and the Life360 is not a “spy” app, it is clearly visible when installed. The development team hopes that you will use this as a springboard to family discussion about safety rules as well as a convenient method to help you all stay in sync even on your busiest days.

Family Messaging and Check-in

Available for Android and iOS, the Life360 Basic plan is FREE and offers a smorgasbord of features that will allow you to evaluate the service. There are also two Premium plans modestly priced at either $5 per month or $50 per year and you can try the Premium plan for a 30-day trial totally free of charge!

Why not give it a try? Don’t wait till Latitude vanishes, with a simple download you can locate, check in, chat & get your family in sync!