Choosing a daily check-in app for an older parent: 8 things to look for

Over a few months in early 2025, my sister and I tried four daily check-in apps with our parents. Two of them, my dad gave up on by the end of the first week. One worked fine for a fortnight, then he stopped using it after a software update changed where the button had moved. The fourth was the one that stuck. The difference between the four was not the features list. It was a handful of small decisions that the people building them had made about the older user.

If you are about to pay for one, here are the eight things worth looking at before you commit. They are in roughly the order I would weight them.

1. One screen, one button, on the parent's side

This is the one that decides whether they actually use the app or not. Open the app on your parent's behalf, do not log in as the family, log in as the person being looked after. If the screen has menus, tabs, a calendar, a settings cog, profile pictures of other family members, a feed, anything more than the one thing they need to do, the app has been designed for the family and bolted on for the older user. They will not use it for long.

What you want is a single screen that opens to one big tap target with a clear label. Everything else, the calendar, the notifications, the family side, lives in the family's version of the app. Mum or Dad sees only their bit.

2. Bigger text, by default

Around a third of UK adults over 70 have some kind of vision impairment, even if it is just needing reading glasses they are not always wearing. An app that defaults to standard mobile text and hides the "larger text" option three menus deep is not designed for older users; it is designed for an able-bodied designer who added an accessibility setting at the end.

The text on the screen they will use most should be readable from arm's length without glasses. That is a higher bar than most apps clear. If you cannot read it across the kitchen, your parent will not be able to either.

3. A gentle nudge if they forget, not a siren

The escalation matters more than the alert. What you want, in order:

• If they have not checked in by the usual time, the app gently nudges them on their own phone. Soft sound, brief, friendly.
• If that does nothing for another half hour or so, the family gets a calm notification. Not an alarm. Not "MUM HAS NOT RESPONDED". Something more like "Mum hasn't checked in yet; you might want to ring."
• Only if that is also ignored does it become urgent.

The wrong pattern is loud and immediate from the first miss. It scares the parent, it embarrasses them when their grandchildren are visiting, and it teaches the family to ignore notifications because most of them are nothing. A calm escalation pattern is the difference between an app that helps and one that gets uninstalled.

4. A family-side picture of the week, not just today

If the app shows you only today's status ("Mum is well today"), it is solving the wrong problem. The problem worth solving is "is the picture across the week reasonable, are there days when nobody is going round, did the cleaner come on Wednesday like she was supposed to."

Look for a shared calendar that the whole family can see, two weeks at a glance, with named slots so two siblings do not both turn up at lunchtime. Bonus points for an automatic flag when there is a stretch of days with nobody scheduled.

5. One price for the whole family, not per-user

Some apps charge per active user, others charge a single household price. Per-user pricing is a problem in this space because the whole point is to get the whole family on it. If a fourth sibling needs to pay an extra fiver a month to join, they won't. Then the app stops being a shared picture.

The clean pricing model for this category is one subscription for the family. Getwello is £4.99 a month for up to ten people. If you are looking at something that wants to bill the cleaner and the daughter separately, ask why.

6. Optional location, off by default

If the app lets the family see where the older parent is on a map, that is a feature worth having, but it is a feature that should be opt-in by the parent, off by default, and easy to switch back off. Apps that turn location on automatically, or that make it the headline feature, are the ones that get described as "tracking apps" by older people, which is not what you want them to be telling their friends at the bowls club.

A daily check-in app and a tracking app are not the same product. The first is about consent and a small daily action. The second is about a dot on a map. If you want both, fine, but make sure the check-in is the main thing.

7. UK-built, UK-hosted, if data matters to you

For most users this does not matter. For some it really does. If the app's terms say "we may transfer your data to processors outside the UK", and your parent has dementia or a condition that makes the data more sensitive, that is worth knowing about. The UK GDPR is stricter than most equivalents, and an app hosted in Ireland or the UK keeps the protections intact.

Smaller UK companies are also more likely to answer the phone in your time zone when something goes wrong with the setup. That matters when the user struggling with it is 84.

8. A real free trial

Most older parents will not commit to a paid app on day one. Even good ones take a fortnight before the daily habit forms. Look for a free first month, ideally applied automatically, ideally with the ability to cancel from the billing page in a click. If the trial requires a phone call to cancel, walk away.

This is where most apps lose families. The trial is too short to know if the older parent will actually use it, or the cancellation flow is awkward, so people stick with something that is not working. Free first month with one-click cancel is the norm worth holding out for.

One more thing, not on the list

Read the App Store and Google Play reviews and look specifically at the one-star and two-star ones. They will tell you more than the five-stars. The pattern to watch for is older users (or their families on their behalf) saying they could not work the screen out. That is the failure mode that matters.

Where Getwello fits

We built Getwello to clear all eight of these bars, but the post is not really about us. If you are choosing one, these are the questions to take to any product page. See how Getwello works or how it differs from a personal alarm. If you are still working out whether you need an app at all, our piece on how often to check in on a parent is the one to read first.