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Zenly alternatives that don't track you in real time

Zenly closed on 3 February 2023. The moving dot has a direct heir in Bump, which the same team built and gives away free on both stores. A new version went out the day before I wrote this. No map will tell you a friend was in your city last Thursday, because a map holds the current position and throws the rest away. Below are the trackers still running in September 2026, with the prices their store listings show. After them comes the other shape of app, where you type a city and two dates and your friends hear about it when their dates land on top of yours.

Snap bought Zenly, then closed it

Snap paid $213.3 million in cash for Zenly in 2017, a figure confirmed in Snap's own SEC filing after the first reports had guessed somewhere between $250M and $350M. Five years on it had around 35 million monthly active users, and Snap closed it anyway, turning down offers to buy it rather than hand a rival a working social map. zen.ly is still up as a headstone. The word zenly, the years 2014 to 2023, "au revoir. bisous.", and a pointer to Snapchat's Map.

More than three years on, search "zenly alternative" and every list still answers with a map. I read the three I could open. Between them, alternativeto.net, a Wondershare listicle dated 30 June 2026 and Product Hunt's alternatives page name Swarm, Superlocal, Glympse, Blink, Life360, Bump, Zood, iSharing, Microsoft Family Safety, GeoZilla, Traccar, FamilyTime, Sup, Gowalla, YouMap and Teleport. Every entry is a live map or a check-in log. Not one of them works from dates instead of positions.

The live trackers still running in September 2026

Install Bump if you want Zenly back the way it was. The App Store description does not pretend otherwise: "From the Zenly team, the original location sharing app loved by 100s of millions of people around the world!" Free, both platforms, version 2.111.1. It promises "precise, real-time, and battery friendly location sharing", and battery is the claim an r/apps comparison thread from 26 November 2025 doubts out loud.

Jagat offers where your friends are, where they have been, how fast they are moving and what their phone's battery is at, plus 30 days of activity history and arrival reminders. Free to install. Super Jagat runs $6.99, $19.99 or $69.99, and a Couple Membership is $12.99 for a month.

Friend groups keep landing on Life360 by accident, and it was built for parents watching teenagers. App Store prices in September 2026: Silver $7.99, Gold $14.99, Platinum $24.99, Driver Protect $14.99. The listing blurs free and Silver together, showing two Places with unlimited alerts and two days of location history there, against 30 days on Gold. It cannot work without continuous background location running.

If anyone in your group is on Android, Apple's Find My is out before you start. For everyone else it is free. Apple's support page says you can share for an hour, until the end of the day, or indefinitely, and that Live Location needs an iPhone on iOS 15 or later at both ends. There is no Android client.

Glympse does the time-boxed version. You send a link and it expires on its own, so nobody lives on a map. Both stores still list it. Version 4.0.33 went out on 26 August 2024, and nothing has shipped since, across two years of iOS releases.

Snap Map and Instagram's Friend Map ride along with apps you already opened today. Snap's own page says location sharing there is off by default, Ghost Mode switches it off again, and "Always" keeps the map updating after you close the app. Instagram shipped Friend Map on 6 August 2025 and spent the following week explaining itself. ABC News quoted a user three days after launch: "Mine was turned on and my home address was showing for all of my followers to see."

whoo is still around and still a live-location app. Its site was up when I checked on 6 September 2026, selling "share your location with close friends and your crush, exchange stickers, and have a great time together!" I cannot tell you the price. The App Store listing threw a 404 at me from the US, Polish and Jordanian storefronts that day, so the subscription figure the listicles all quote is one I am not going to repeat. Facebook's Nearby Friends got to this idea years before any of them and went away on 31 May 2022 along with location history and background location. Meta shipped nothing to replace it.

The Android wall

On r/apps in November 2025, a commenter in a comparison thread about location apps wrote: "Cries in Android. My entire friend group uses Find My and I'm just... not there." Nine days later, in the r/androidapps thread "Any good location sharing apps these days?" (5 December 2025, 48 comments), someone answered from the other side of the same wall: "I realize how stupid I sound suggesting this on an android apps subreddit but FindMy+iMessage works well lol".

Find My is the best-built free option on this page and it only works if nobody in the group ever changes phones.

What the threads keep asking for

The r/androidapps thread opens with a line that reads like the search query itself: "A long long while ago there used to be an app named Zenly... Is there anything still like that these days?" Read enough of these and the ask keeps drifting off the map. The r/apps thread from 26 November 2025 opens on what the app must never do: "Me and my friends have been trying to find a decent location sharing app that doesn't kill battery and doesn't make us feel like we're being tracked by our parents!" In March 2022 someone on r/apps described what they wanted as "Basically a location sharing app, but not constant." And a week before the lights went out, on 26 January 2023, a commenter on r/androidapps asked: "What's the point of a location sharing app if you can hide or fake your location anytime you want".

On 31 October 2019, an r/apps poster hunting for something less invasive complained that "Some of the 'Find a Friend' mobile phone apps seem to be data mining in disguise". That thread recommended Zenly.

A city and two dates instead of a dot

You add a trip: a city, plus a start and an end date. Your friends add theirs. When two trips land in the same city, within 100 km, on dates that touch, both phones get a push notification. Miss each other by a few days and the app says so, up to about a week either side. It is called a near miss.

Your home city counts as a standing answer, so a friend flying into your home city matches you if you are home that week. Friends see the overlap and nothing else, that city and those dates, while the rest of your trip list stays yours and no screen in the app shows a person's itinerary.

Nothing here needs a background location permission. A city name is something you typed on purpose, which is also why the battery question that runs through every one of those threads never comes up here.

What a location feed is worth, in dollars

The Markup reported in December 2021 that Life360 was "selling data on kids' and families' whereabouts to approximately a dozen data brokers", and that in 2020 the company made $16 million from location data, nearly 20 percent of its revenue that year. An editor's note on the piece records that Life360 later said it would stop selling precise data to those brokers, while keeping precise sales to Arity and aggregated sales to PlacerAI. A 2023 lawsuit cited the investigation. Whether any of it still happens today, I do not know, and neither does anyone writing these listicles.

That $16 million is roughly what a continuous position feed on tens of millions of phones fetches in a year. Nobody is buying a list of city names people typed by hand, which is why you do not have to take the privacy promise on trust. Will U Be There stores your email, a display name and a username, a home city with coordinates, trip cities with dates, an optional avatar, your friend list, a push token and a pseudonymous crash identifier. That list is all of it. Data sits in Supabase's eu-west-1 region in Ireland, crash reports go to Sentry's Frankfurt region, there is no ad SDK in the build, and the privacy page names every third party. I wrote more about the same trade in Life360 alternatives that don't sell your data.

Where Will U Be There fits, and what it cannot do

Will U Be There is free, on iPhone and Android, in 17 languages, with no ads and no in-app purchases. Alongside the matching it shows what is on where you are staying: concerts, exhibitions, festivals and markets within 15 km of your trip, inside your dates, from over 200,000 upcoming events across 57 countries. Plenty of them are free.

Will U Be There never receives your live location, so no screen in it can show you where a friend is standing. Strangers are not part of it. And if what you need is a family map, Find My does that job and this does not.

The friends-won't-install-it problem is real, and the answer the app has for it is a group link. One link, up to 200 people, no friend requests inside the group, and anyone who joins and adds a trip shows up in your matches. iPhone and Android alike, which matters if you are the one Android user in a group of iPhones. If you want a picture of the mechanism first, how to know when a friend will be in the same city as you walks through it, and the full inventory of overlap apps covers the competitors I know of.

And if what you want is the dot, install Bump. It is free, made by the people who made Zenly, and it does the one thing this app has no way to do.