Six family apps for caring for an older parent: what works, what doesn't

Three months in to looking after Mum properly, I had downloaded eleven apps to my phone. Some are still there. Most got deleted within a week. A couple did half the job. None did all of it.

This is the honest version, written for the family who is sat on the kitchen table at 9pm trying to work out which thing to actually use. There is no winner at the end. There is a way of choosing that works, and a few combinations worth knowing about.

What we were actually trying to solve

Before any of this, list the problem. Most families end up with the wrong app because they bought the wrong problem first. For us it was three things, in this order:

• I want to know Mum is alright today, without ringing her at 7am and waking her up.
• My sister and I want to stop double-booking visits, or worse, both assuming the other one is going.
• If something does happen, we want a way for Mum to flag it without having to think.

Different families have different orders. If yours is "Mum has had two falls in the last year and I want her to be able to press something" then a personal alarm jumps to the top. If yours is "we are six siblings and a stepfather and we cannot agree on anything" then coordination matters most. Pick your real problem and the app picks itself.

The family WhatsApp group

Free, already on everyone's phone, and where most families start. We did. It works for a while, then it quietly stops.

The reason is the same reason any group chat gets unmanageable. Messages slide off the bottom of the screen. Plans get made by whoever shouts loudest. You cannot see the visits that are planned, only the ones being discussed right now. And worst of all, you cannot see the gaps. The four days in a row when nobody is planning to pop in are invisible until the Sunday evening when someone notices.

WhatsApp is brilliant for "I'm with Mum, she sounds bright today." It is poor at "who is going on Wednesday and is anyone in on Thursday afternoon."

Good for: the immediate emotional updates between siblings.
Bad for: the structural week-ahead view, and any sort of "did anyone go yesterday" question.

A shared Google Calendar

This was our next try. We made a calendar called "Mum" and shared it across the three of us. It is genuinely better than WhatsApp for visit planning. You can see the week, you can drop a slot in for Friday, you can colour-code by who is going.

What we learned: it gets contaminated. Birthdays go in there, then a work meeting somehow lands in it, then a child's school play, and pretty soon the calendar is everyone's life in one bin. The visits to Mum drown.

The other thing is, a calendar is a calendar. It cannot tell you whether Mum is actually well today. Visits are a plan, not a signal. You still have to ring her.

Good for: visit coordination if you protect the calendar from drift.
Bad for: daily reassurance, anything that needs to come from your parent themselves.

Life360

You will hear this one mentioned a lot. Worth being honest: it was built for parents tracking teenagers, and it still feels like that. It tracks location, drops pins, tells you when someone has arrived and left a place.

For an older parent, that combination is awkward. A lot of older people do not want to be tracked. Even if they say they do not mind, it changes the relationship. There is a quiet difference between knowing your Mum and surveilling her.

If your particular worry is "Mum has been getting lost on her usual walk and I need to know where she is" then Life360 (or any geofencing tool) earns its place. For most families, this is overkill, and a daily check-in does the job without the awkwardness.

Good for: the small minority of cases where location really is the thing.
Bad for: ordinary families looking after a parent who would rather not feel watched.

Snug Safety

Snug is a daily check-in app, and a good one. The Check-in Member opens the app, taps a button, and the family sees it. If they do not tap by a certain time, the family is alerted.

It does this bit well. The interface is simple. It is reasonably priced.

Where it stops is the calendar. Snug does not give the family a way to coordinate visits between siblings, plan a rota, or see who is going round when. It is a one-feature app done properly. If daily reassurance is the only thing you need, it is worth a look.

Good for: the single problem of "did Mum check in today?"
Bad for: anything to do with siblings, visits, or sharing the load.

Personal alarms (Age UK, Tunstall, Careline)

Pendant alarms are not really apps, but a lot of families end up comparing them to apps because they are looking at the same money each month. So I will include them.

A personal alarm is for one specific scenario: your parent has had a fall, or is having a medical emergency, and needs someone to come immediately. They press the button, a call centre answers, an ambulance or a designated contact is despatched.

This is brilliant for the scenario it is designed for. It is poor at everything else. The pendant cannot tell you Mum is alright today, only that she has not pressed the button. It does not help you and your sister stop double-booking visits. It does not help with the emotional load of caring.

The right comparison is not "alarm vs app." Most families end up needing both. A pendant in case the worst happens, and an app for the ordinary days when nothing is going wrong but you still want to know.

Good for: emergencies, falls, getting help fast.
Bad for: daily reassurance, coordination, the ninety-nine days out of a hundred when nothing has gone wrong.

Getwello (yes, this is us)

I will not pretend I am neutral here. We make Getwello, and we made it because nothing else we tried did the two things we needed at once: a one-tap daily check-in from Mum that the whole family sees, and a small shared visit calendar so my sister and I could stop chasing each other.

So if you set Getwello up, you get those two things working together. Mum taps a single button each morning. The family sees it within seconds. The visit calendar shows two weeks at a time, gaps included, and any sibling can add a slot. There is a quiet little family chat called the Family Room, separate from the main family WhatsApp, so the conversations about Mum do not get lost between the birthday plans.

What it does not do: replace a pendant alarm for emergencies. We are honest about that. If a fall is a serious worry, you want a pendant too. Getwello is for the ordinary days, which is most of them.

The other thing it does not do, by design: it cannot tap "I'm well" on Mum's behalf. It has to be her tap. That is the entire point. If she does not tap, the family hears about it. We could automate it, plenty of apps would, but a check-in only means something if it comes from the person.

Good for: a family who wants daily reassurance and visit coordination in one place.
Bad for: emergencies on its own (pair it with a pendant), or families where the parent really does not want any app on their phone.

What to actually look for

If you take nothing else from this, look for these four things. They sound small. They are the difference between an app you use for a year and one you delete in a week.

1. Does the daily signal come from the parent themselves? If the app pretends your parent is well by reading their phone activity or location, you are not getting reassurance. You are getting a guess.
2. Can the whole family see the same thing without setting it up six different times? Apps that are easy for one person and hard for the rest of the family quietly become solo apps.
3. Is the older parent's screen simpler than yours? Mum's screen should not have menus, settings, notifications and chat threads. If she has the same app as you, the app has not understood the problem.
4. Can you see the gaps in the visit calendar at a glance? Not the visits. The gaps. That is where the worry lives.

The honest recommendation

Most families end up with two things, not one. A daily check-in tool for the ordinary days, and a pendant or similar for emergencies. The order matters: get the daily one working first, because that is what you will use every day. Add the emergency one when the worry justifies it.

If WhatsApp and a Google Calendar are working for your family, do not change anything. The best app is the one your family will actually use. We made Getwello for the families where those tools have started to creak, and the morning check on Mum has quietly become a problem.

If you would like to read more in this vein, our piece on why your family group chat is failing your Mum is the long version of the WhatsApp section above. And if your worry is more "she is on her own all weekend" than "she has not got back to me", how we built a family rota is closer to the right read.