Verizon Family app lets you track your family's location and activity, but is it worth it?

Today Verizon announced it is rebranding its Smart Family service to Verizon Family, and with it comes a few new features and a brand new pricing structure.

The new Verizon Family app offers many of the same features as its predecessor including the ability to easily track family members and view how much time a child is spending on their phone, as well as other basics like setting limits on screen time. Honestly, it’s pretty much just the same app as before.  I spent about a half hour messing around with the new app and found the general UI and settings to be pretty much straight ports from the older app.

The Verizon Family app also lets parents view their kid’s text and call activity. Keep in mind this is just a log of who they called and texted and not full access to view the messages. You can also monitor your own personal driving activity and set location alerts. There’s even a new Safe Walk SOS feature that allows a user to share real-time location data with emergency contacts.

To be fair, none of this is particularly novel and pretty much is baked into every Android and iOS device. Google’s Find My Phone features can do a lot of the same tracking, even if not quite as conveniently. For parental control aspects, there are tons of options elsewhere. For example, my personal go-to for my family has been Google Family Link. This app is integrated right into the Android experience, is completely free, and isn’t tied to a specific carrier so I don’t have to switch my family security service if I decide to leave for another wireless provider.

The good news is, unlike Smart Family which started at $4.99 a month, Verizon Family is free for postpaid Verizon subscribers. Verizon’s family app also offers premium features that you won’t find through other Google services for an additional cost of $14.99. We already mentioned Driving Insights but the premium tier includes the ability to monitor more than yourself. This is handy for those with teen drivers. There are also more advanced parental controls, full-screen limits for all members, basic Roadside Assistance, and a few other small differences.

Is Verizon Family worth downloading?

Based on my experiences with both apps, I’d say that going with a service like Google Family Link and your built-in phone tracking tools is probably a better route for many families, especially if you’re an all-Android household.

The free tier is fairly basic, while the premium membership doesn’t add that much more. The parental control additions are nice but frankly, you’ll find other apps designed for families that allow much more granular control that will cost you less. Qustodio comes to mind, as this parental control service costs around $55 a year for families with five devices or less, which amounts to about $5 a month.

Of course, we should bring up the reality of families that have both Android and iOS devices. While there are free ways to do all this with both platforms, Verizon’s app would provide a more unified, platform-agnostic solution to both tracking and family controls.

If you’re a Verizon subscriber already it doesn’t hurt to download the app and decide for yourself. That said, if you already have a working solution, it’s probably not worth the effort to switch.

Interested in the new app? You’ll want to click the following link to Verizon’s site to learn more about Google Family.