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10 best parking apps to find a spot and your car
There are two types of parking apps. The first helps you find a parking spot in a crowded city or town. The second helps you find your car in a large parking area. Thankfully, our list includes both types of apps. Apps like these are especially helpful when you’re in massive areas like cities, amusement parks, malls, shopping centers, and other various areas. Parking is a real pain in most crowded cities most of the time. Hopefully, these apps help! Here are the best parking apps for Android.
For the sake of simplicity, we’ve broken this list up into two sections. The first five apps help you find your car after you parked. Meanwhile, the second set of apps help you find an actual parking spot for your car. We think between the two, you should be able to find what you’re looking for.
The best parking apps for Android
Google Maps
Price: Free
Google Maps is a surprisingly decent option to find your car. You can use the app to mark your location as your parking spot and then return to it as needed. Of course, it doubles as a navigation app with all of the features that come with it. The process to save your location as your parking spot isn’t difficult. You can find instructions to do it for Android devices here and iOS devices here.
See also: How to use Google Maps offline
Parkify
Price: Free / Up to $5.99
Parkify is a decent option for finding your car. It uses a Bluetooth connection to detect when you walk away from your car and marks your location for future reference. However, you can also manually set the location if the Bluetooth thing doesn’t work for you. It lets you save as many parking spaces as needed and you can even share your car’s location in case you need a friend to get it for you. The reviews tell of some bugs here and there, but nothing too serious.
ParKing
Price: Free / $6.49
ParKing is another simple, but usually effective parking app. It offers a simple UI, a one-tap save for your parking location, and it can automatically detect your parking spot as well. The automatic detecting is a bit buggy and worked half of the time in our testing. However, my car also has an absurd Bluetooth range so that may have been the cause of the issues. Some other features include support for Wear OS, a home screen widget, and it has features for indoor and underground parking as well. The full version is a bit expensive, though.
Parked Car Locator
Price: Free (with ads)
Parked Car Locator is a really simple app that does a simple thing. You pin your location when you get out of your car and then follow the marker back to find your car later. The app has a couple of different map modes, a location history, and it’ll gauge your distance from your car as best as it can. It got it right within 50 meters during our testing and that’s fairly decent compared to some of the low rent parking apps we tested. It’s a free app with ads and it’s really quite simple.
Manufacturer apps and physical car GPS trackers
Price: Varies
Hardware is also a solution for those who want to go the hardcore route. Many car manufacturers have apps now, including Chevy, Ford, and others. Many of those apps come with a vehicle locator function in case you lose your parking spot. Additionally, physical GPS trackers are useful for finding your car in parking lots as well. Of course, the main use for them is to find your car if it’s stolen, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use them to find parking spots in the meantime. We have FordPass linked, but you can go with basically any of them as long as they have an Android app for phone control.
The Parking Spot
Price: Free
The Parking Spot is one of many decent parking apps. This one helps you find parking spaces. You can consult a map to find a parking spot in the area you want to go. Additionally, the app lets you make parking reservations, actually pay for them, and get in without any hassle. However, that feature only works on some lots. Some other features include a TPS Shuttle finder and some other neat stuff. There really isn’t much to complain about. It does what it says it does.
Parkopedia Parking
Price: Free / Up to $5.49
Parkopedia Parking is another somewhat popular, decent option for parking apps. The app uses crowdsourcing to show you as many parking spots as possible. It boasts a library of over 70 million parking spots across 15,000 cities. It also tries to show you prices for parking lots when it can. However, because of the crowdsourcing aspect, some of those prices come out wrong. However, it can help identify what kind of payments a lot receives and that information is usually right. It’s usually a good one.
See also: The best road trip apps for Android
ParkWhiz
Price: Free
ParkWhiz is a lot like The Parking Spot. It shows you where to find a bunch of parking. However, it also gives you access to parking reservations and you can pay in advance if you want to. It offers up thousands of locations across the U.S. and Canada and there is a price comparison tool if you really need one. The app hits most of the big cities like Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, and even Toronto. It won’t show you the hidden gem parking spots, but it’s good for what it does.
SpotAngels
Price: Free
SpotAngels is another crowd-sourcing parking app. We actually covered this one when it launched a long time ago and it’s grown up a lot since then. You can find a variety of parking spaces, including paid parking spots. Additionally, the app can help you avoid parking tickets, street cleaning, and help you find alternate side street parking if needed. Believe it or not, SpotAngels also has a car locator function to help you find your car in large, crowded parking lots. This is probably the best all-in-one option for parking apps as long as you don’t mind helping contribute some info from time to time.
See also: The best car tracking apps for Android
SpotHero
Price: Free
SpotHero is a decent app to round out our list. It works very much like The Parking Spot or ParkWhiz. You can find and reserve parking spaces in larger, major cities. The app lets you pay with Google if you want to (and we recommend it). Additionally, there are tools for people who use the app for business purposes and the UI is actually quite nice. This isn’t something we’d recommend if you’re parking at the zoo, but if you’re traveling to Chicago, you could try this one.
If we missed any great parking apps, tell us about them in the comments. You can also click here to check out our latest Android app and game lists!
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