Why your family locator says "Permission needed" — and how to fix it

If someone in your Loop is stuck showing Permission needed, nothing is broken. A setting on their phone is stopping the app from reporting a location, and the fix is almost always one of four things.

This is the single most common support question we get, so here is the whole list.

1. Location is set to "While Using" instead of always

This is the big one. Both iOS and Android let you grant an app location access only while it is open on screen. That is a perfectly sensible default — and it makes a family locator useless, because the entire point is that it keeps working after you put the phone in your pocket.

Without always-on access, place alerts will not fire, Safe Arrival Timers cannot check your position against your destination, and your Loop will see your last position from whenever the app was last open.

• iPhone: Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Famloop → Always.
• Android: Settings → Location → App permissions → Famloop → Allow all the time.

Android will often ask you to confirm this a second time on a separate screen. That is the system being careful, not a bug.

2. Precise location is off

Both platforms can give an app a deliberately fuzzy position — roughly your neighbourhood rather than your street. For a weather app that is a good trade. For a family locator it means arrival alerts fire late, early, or not at all, because the app genuinely cannot tell whether you are at the school or three streets away.

• iPhone: same Location Services screen → turn on Precise Location.
• Android: App permissions → Famloop → Use precise location.

3. Battery saving is suspending the app

This one is sneaky, because nothing looks wrong. The permission is granted, the app is installed, and updates simply stop arriving — usually after the phone has been idle for a while.

On iPhone, Low Power Mode reduces background activity. On Android, aggressive battery optimisation can suspend an app entirely, and several manufacturers layer their own power manager on top of Android's.

• iPhone: turn off Low Power Mode, and check Settings → General → Background App Refresh.
• Android: Settings → Apps → Famloop → Battery → Unrestricted.

If you have a Samsung, Xiaomi, OnePlus, Huawei or Oppo device, look for an extra "protected apps", "auto-start" or "sleeping apps" list in the manufacturer's own battery settings. Famloop needs to be excluded there too.

4. The phone is simply offline

No signal, airplane mode, or a phone that is switched off. Famloop shows Offline for this rather than Permission needed — with the time the connection dropped and the last known position — so you can tell the two situations apart at a glance.

Let the app tell you which one it is

Rather than working through the list above, open Signal Check on the phone that is having the problem. It names the specific setting that is blocking updates and links straight to it.

That screen exists because "turn some settings on" is not useful advice when there are a dozen candidate settings across two operating systems and several manufacturer skins.

Why we show this at all

Plenty of apps would simply display the last known position and say nothing. The dot would look fine. You would have no way to know that the information was hours old because a battery setting quietly suspended the app three days ago.

Famloop treats "we cannot currently get a location" as something you need to be told, not something to hide. It is less tidy. It is also the only version that is any use when it matters.