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A personal safety app: create trip plans with an expected return time, add safety contacts, and if you don't check out on time your contacts are automatically notified with your trip details and location.
Passwordless sign-in: Continue with Email for a one-time code, or Continue with Apple. Your account is created the first time you sign in. Your safety contacts never need an account.
Anything where someone should know where you're going and when you'll be back: hikes, walks home at night, kids' field trips, nights out, even grocery runs.
Usually a few shorter ones. A trip has a single expected return time, so one that covers a whole day only really checks on you once, at the very end. Splitting the day into legs — drive out, hike, drive home — gives your contacts a real signal at each step and lets you keep each grace period tight.
It also helps your battery. Anything a trip is running, like live location, ends when that leg ends instead of running all day.
Start from the Home tab. You get three ways to go:
Free accounts can assign 2 safety contacts per trip; Homebound+ allows 5.
After your ETA plus grace period, Homebound automatically notifies your safety contacts with your activity, location, notes, and last known position.
Extra time after your ETA before alerts fire. Example: an ETA of 5:00 PM plus a 30-minute grace period means contacts are notified at 5:30 PM. It prevents false alarms, and you can customize it per trip.
No. Homebound notifies your personal contacts. It does not contact emergency services. In an emergency, always call 911 first.
Write your own trip-start and overdue messages instead of the standard text. Custom messages are a Homebound+ feature.
Yes. Save Home, Work, or the trailhead under Settings > Saved Locations and pick them when creating trips.
Yes. Settings > Customization has a Favorite Activities list — pin the activities you use most and drag them into the order you want, and they appear that way every time you create a trip. Free accounts can pin 1 activity; Homebound+ raises that to 3.
Yes. Tap your avatar on your profile or in Settings > Account, then take a photo or choose one from your library and crop it. Friends see it across the app. Homebound re-encodes every upload and strips all metadata first — including any GPS coordinates the original photo carried — and you can remove the photo from the same menu at any time.
A check-in is an optional progress update. Checking out ends your trip and tells everyone you're safe. That's the one that matters: miss it and your contacts are alerted.
Optional nudges to check in at an interval you choose. They're just for you; contacts never see them. Free.
No. Missed check-ins alert no one; contacts are only notified if you miss your checkout (ETA plus grace period). This is the part people most often get backwards.
Yes, per trip: turn on "notification hours" (default 8 AM–10 PM). Emergency alerts always come through.
If your trip has a destination, Homebound notices when you get within about 150 metres of it and sends you an "Arrived at…?" notification suggesting you check out. It never checks you out on its own — "Not yet" dismisses it and the trip carries on.
It comes back each time you leave that radius and return, so a destination set at or near where you're actually spending the trip can prompt you repeatedly. Either set the destination to where the trip really ends, or start the trip from your current location without one. Checking out stops the prompts for good.
Arrival reminders need location access. With "Always" they arrive whenever you get there; with "While Using" they only fire while Homebound is open.
Go to Settings > Emergency Contacts and add a name and email, or add one while you're creating a trip. Free accounts: 2 contacts per trip; Homebound+: 5.
Save a set of contacts under one name, like "Hiking buddies" or "Family", and add them all to a trip at once. Contact groups are a Homebound+ feature.
No. Contacts get email notifications, no app or account needed. If they do have Homebound, add them as friends for live-trip features.
Emails when you start a trip, check in, finish, go overdue, are marked safe after being overdue, extend your ETA, send an SOS, or cancel. On group trips they're also told as each person gets home. Every email includes a "Follow This Trip" link that opens in any browser.
Yes. Friends get the same notifications, plus in-app trip details and live location (if enabled).
Yes. Every email includes a live web page: trip status, ETA countdown, last check-in on a map, and a timeline. It refreshes on its own.
A red one-tap button on every active trip that immediately alerts all your safety contacts, no waiting for your ETA. Free.
Open your active trip, tap SOS, confirm, and optionally add a message. The confirmation step prevents accidental triggers.
An urgent alert with your name, your optional message, and your last known location. Friends get a push notification; email contacts get an email.
No. SOS alerts your personal contacts only. In immediate danger, call 911 first, then use SOS to loop in your people.
One-tap presets for routine outings: your daily run, the climbing gym, the walk home. A Quick Trip remembers the activity, location or destination, duration, grace period, safety contacts, and whether to share your live location — so starting it takes a single tap from the Home tab. Free accounts get 5 Quick Trips; Homebound+ raises that to 10.
Open the trip starter from the Home tab and tap "+ New Quick Trip", or tap an existing preset's edit control to change it. You can turn presets off without deleting them, and reorder them however you like.
Yes, for Quick Trips that head to a destination. Turn on the estimated travel time option and Homebound builds the trip length from a live route between wherever you are when you start and where you're going, along with a matching grace period. You'll see the estimate before you go. It works for walking, hiking, driving, and biking; for other activities — or when no route can be found — the preset falls back to the duration you saved.
Yes. Say something like "Start my walk home in Homebound" and Siri starts that Quick Trip. Your Quick Trips also show up in the Shortcuts app under a "Start Quick Trip" action, so you can put one on your Home Screen or fire it from an automation. Homebound comes to the foreground while it starts — it needs a live location fix to open the trip.
Only Quick Trips that already have at least one safety contact or friend saved on them can be started by voice or shortcut — there's no step in a voice start for choosing who should be watching, so someone has to be set in advance. Open the Quick Trip in Homebound, add a contact, and it will show up. A preset that's switched off, or one you've deleted, won't appear either.
The watch app shows your active trip and its countdown, and puts the actions that matter on your wrist:
It's a companion to the iPhone app rather than a standalone one: you sign in and create trips on your phone, and the watch handles what happens once a trip is running. An SOS sent from the watch goes out without a typed message.
Not for the actions above. Your phone syncs the trip and a signing token to the watch, so as long as the watch itself has a connection — cellular or Wi-Fi — check in, extend, finish, and SOS go straight to Homebound with the phone nowhere nearby. You do need your iPhone to sign in the first time, to create trips, and to keep the watch's trip data current. If the watch has nothing synced, it'll ask you to open Homebound on your phone.
Yes. Homebound offers complications in the circular, rectangular, inline, and corner styles, showing your trip status and a live countdown. Adding one also helps the watch refresh in the background more often. If the watch hasn't heard from your phone in roughly half a day, the complication switches to a quiet "sync" state instead of showing a stale countdown — a safety complication shouldn't imply it's current when it isn't.
Yes, and it works with no signal at all. When a trip syncs, the watch schedules its own haptic alerts for your ETA and for the end of your grace period, so they fire even deep in the backcountry. Checking in, extending, or finishing moves or clears them. The alerts include a "Check In" button so you can respond straight from the notification. They need notification permission for Homebound on the watch — if that's off, the app says so on the trip screen rather than letting a safety alert fail quietly.
If your phone is streaming live location on a trip and then goes out of range, the watch offers — once per trip — to carry the stream, sending a position on its background refresh cadence (roughly every 15 minutes, though watchOS decides the actual timing; a Homebound complication on your face helps). The phone stays in charge whenever it's reachable. Watch updates are less frequent than the phone's, and the trip screen shows when the last position actually landed rather than promising a schedule.
Friends tab → "Add Friend": share your reusable invite link or have them scan your QR code.
You control it item by item under Settings > Friends: check-in locations, trip notes, and whether friends can request an update from you during a trip, plus which profile stats are visible (total trips, adventure time, favorite activity, achievements). Live location has its own switch under Settings > Privacy.
If enabled, friends can request a check-in during your active trip; you check in with one tap. They can also "Watch Live."
Friends tab → their profile → remove. They lose access to your trips.
Finished trips can appear in a shared feed with a map snapshot, duration, and stats. Optional and free.
Nothing, unless you choose to share it. A finished trip stays private until you open it and tap "Share with Friends" — there's no automatic publishing. Before you share you pick how the location appears (Show, Generalize, or Hide), and on a group trip whether to list the participants or show only a count. You can un-publish a shared trip at any time.
Yes. On a feed post you can leave a comment, react with an emoji, and @mention friends. These features are free.
Live location sharing lets your friends and group-trip participants see your real-time position during an active trip, updated continuously on a map in their app. (Email contacts instead see your most recent check-in location through the "Follow This Trip" link.) It's completely optional and is enabled per trip.
When creating a trip, toggle "Share Live Location" to enable it for that specific trip. You can also set a default under Settings > Privacy > "Allow Live Location." Live location only activates once you start the trip (when it becomes active) — it won't run for a trip that's still scheduled for later.
Yes, noticeably. While a trip with live sharing is running, Homebound holds the GPS at full accuracy and sends your position as often as every 30 seconds. That's what makes the dot on your friends' map move in real time, and it's the most power-hungry thing the app does.
It stops the moment the trip ends or you turn sharing off. For a long day, start with a full battery or bring a charger. If nobody actually needs to watch a live map, leaving live location off is the single biggest thing you can do for battery.
Yes. There's no switch on the trip screen itself, but Settings > Privacy > "Allow Live Location" turns it off everywhere, including a trip that's already running. Your phone stops sending positions right away, and our servers stop storing them for you.
The trip carries on exactly as before: your ETA, check-ins, overdue alerts, and SOS all work the same, and your contacts still get everything they normally would. Turn the switch back on and sharing resumes the next time the app refreshes your active trip.
Circle sharing is separate. It isn't affected by this switch and has its own Stop button.
It asks for a single position at the moments that need one, then stops: when you check in, when you extend your ETA, and when you send an SOS. Nothing runs in between.
If your trip has a destination, Homebound also watches for you arriving so it can remind you to check out. That uses the same low-power geofencing iOS uses for reminders, not continuous GPS.
Accuracy depends on your device's GPS capabilities and environmental conditions. In open areas with clear sky view, accuracy is typically within a few meters. In canyons, dense forests, or indoors, accuracy may be reduced. Live location should be treated as an approximate guide, not a precise tracking system.
A Circle is a named group of friends you choose to share your live location with — for example "Family" or "Roommates." You decide exactly who's in each Circle and when to share. Circles are free; you can create up to 20, with up to 50 people each.
Trip live location is tied to a specific trip and your safety contacts. A Circle is separate from trips entirely — it's ongoing location sharing with friends you pick, on your schedule, whether or not you're on a trip. Both are also different from contact groups, which are simply a way to add several saved safety contacts to a trip at once.
Open the Map tab and tap the people icon at the top right — that's where Circles lives. Create a Circle, name it, and add friends. Then pick how long to share for — 1 hour, 4 hours, 8 hours, 1 day, 3 days, or 1 week — and tap "Share My Location." While you're sharing, a bar with a "Stop" button sits above the tab bar wherever you are in the app, so you can end it at any time. You can also stop from inside the Circle itself.
Discover suggests interesting places near you based on your current location and the weather. It needs location access and an internet connection, and it's free. Discover doesn't create a trip for you — it's just for finding somewhere to go.
For places — trailheads, crags, campgrounds, breweries — tapping opens directions in Apple Maps. Concerts work differently: the card shows the date, start time, price, and venue, and tapping takes you to the event page to get tickets rather than to directions.
Discover covers ten activities: hiking, running, climbing, biking, camping, surfing, skiing, snowboarding, bars & breweries, and nearby concerts. Some are seasonal — for example, ski and snowboard spots show in winter and surfing in the warmer months — so what you see changes with the time of year and conditions.
If Homebound can't find good matches for an activity near you, it says "Nothing nearby" rather than show low-quality or irrelevant results. That usually just means there aren't strong options close by right now, or the activity is out of season. If the whole tab is empty, make sure location access is enabled.
Yes. You'll see current conditions for your destination when creating a trip and on completed trip details. You can also save Favorite Locations in the Weather view to check conditions and get alerts when the weather looks great for the activities you choose.
Your safety score is a 0-100 rating computed from your trip history. It's based on three factors:
Scores are graded as: A+ (90-100), A (80-89), B (70-79), C (60-69), D (50-59), F (below 50).
Only completed trips count. Cancelled trips are left out of the calculation entirely, and trips still in progress don't count until they're finished.
Check-in rate only applies to trips where you enabled check-in reminders (set a check-in interval). If you don't use check-in reminders, this factor doesn't affect your score negatively.
When you do enable check-in reminders:
Trip length tiers: To keep scoring fair, trip length is capped based on duration:
Formula: rate = (check-ins ÷ capped length) × 1200, maxing out at 100%.
Examples:
The weekly recap summarizes your adventure activity for the current week. It shows your trip count, total adventure hours, whether all trips were completed safely, any overdue incidents, and your busiest day of the week.
No. Your safety score and weekly recap are computed entirely on your device using trip data already stored locally. No additional data is collected, transmitted, or stored on our servers for these features.
Three things move it: check out before your ETA plus grace period expires; check in at least once on trips where you've set a check-in interval; and add more safety contacts, since three or more earns full coverage credit. Cancelling a trip doesn't hurt your score — cancelled trips are excluded — but it doesn't help it either. Consistent habits raise the score over time.
Group trips let you create a single trip with multiple participants — group hikes, ski trips, dive excursions. Everyone can check in, and each participant's location can be shared with the group.
When you create the trip you choose who can end it:
You can also switch on individual finish: each person taps "I'm home" as they arrive, everyone gets told, and the trip ends on its own once the last person is back.
A group trip supports up to 20 participants, including the trip owner.
When creating a trip, add participants by searching for friends who use Homebound. They'll receive an invitation notification and can accept to join your trip.
Yes. The trip owner — or any participant, if the owner allows it — can tap "Add" on an active group trip to invite more friends.
Yes. If you're a participant (not the owner), you can leave an active group trip from the trip menu. The trip continues for everyone else.
If you're a safety contact for several people on the same group trip, Homebound combines them into one "Watching N people" card in your Friends tab, so you can follow everyone at once instead of seeing separate cards.
Yes. Group trips are available to all users regardless of subscription status.
Achievements are badges you earn by completing trips and reaching milestones. There are 40 achievements across five categories — Total Trips, Adventure Time, Activities, Locations, and Time Patterns (which includes night-owl and weekend badges). View your badges from the Home tab.
Free users can access the last 30 days of trip history. Homebound+ subscribers get unlimited access to their full trip history.
Yes. The History tab has a search field that matches trip names and locations, plus a separate filter for activity type.
Yes. From a completed trip you can create a share card — a clean image summary you can post as a story or square, or send to friends. This is separate from the live "Follow This Trip" link your contacts receive during an active trip.
Home Screen widgets show your active trip's status and countdown, and the medium "Trip Control" widget adds Check In and Check Out buttons you can tap without opening the app. There are Lock Screen widgets too: Trip Status, Trip Countdown, and Trip Details. To add one, long-press your Home Screen or Lock Screen and look for Homebound. Trips are created in the app, not from a widget — though Siri and the Shortcuts app can start a Quick Trip for you.
Live Activity shows your active trip status on your iPhone's lock screen and in the Dynamic Island. You can see your countdown timer, trip name, and quickly check in or mark yourself safe without unlocking your phone.
Yes. Both widgets and Live Activity are available to all users at no cost.
Homebound+ is our premium subscription. The safety loop itself stays free — Homebound+ raises limits and unlocks a few conveniences:
Every part of the safety loop is free, including:
Go to Settings > Homebound+ to view subscription options. We offer monthly and annual plans. The annual plan includes Family Sharing through Apple. Subscriptions are processed through the App Store and can be managed in your Apple ID account settings.
To cancel Homebound+, go to your iPhone's Settings > Apple ID > Subscriptions > Homebound and tap "Cancel Subscription." You'll retain access to premium features until the end of your current billing period. We cannot process cancellations directly.
Refunds are handled by Apple since they process all payments. To request a refund, visit reportaproblem.apple.com or contact Apple Support. We don't have the ability to issue refunds directly.
Yes, the annual Homebound+ plan supports Apple Family Sharing. The family organizer can share the subscription with up to 5 family members. Family Sharing is not available on the monthly plan.
Invite someone new to Homebound with your invite link. When they join through it and finish their first trip, you each get 7 days of Homebound+. Your dashboard is in Settings under "Give 7, Get 7."
Three things:
Each person can qualify once. Until they finish that trip, they show as "pending first trip" on your dashboard.
You can earn up to 90 days of Homebound+ per rolling 365 days from referrals. Days you earn are banked rather than burned: they only start counting down when you don't already have paid coverage, so subscribing while you have credit doesn't waste it — the unused whole days go back into the bank. Your dashboard shows your balance and how much of the yearly limit you've used.
Settings > Give 7, Get 7 has your link plus a copy button, your referral list, and your balance. It's the same reusable friend invite link and QR code you'd use to add someone as a friend — anyone who joins through it and qualifies counts.
On someone else's feed post, open the "…" menu and choose Report Post. On a comment, use the comment's menu and choose Report Comment. To report a person, open their profile from the Friends tab and choose Report. You pick a reason — spam, harassment or bullying, inappropriate content, impersonation, or something else — and can add details. Reports are reviewed within 24 hours.
Open their profile from the Friends tab and choose Block. Blocking ends the friendship, hides their content from you and yours from them, and stops them from adding you as a friend again.
Settings > Privacy > Blocked Users lists everyone you've blocked and lets you unblock them. Unblocking doesn't restore the friendship — if you want to be friends again, one of you has to send a new invite.
No. We only collect location data when you explicitly choose to share it: setting a trip location, checking in with location enabled, sharing live location during an active trip, or sharing to a Circle. Outside of those, there's no background location tracking — and you can stop live sharing at any time.
We collect only what's necessary: your email, name, age, trip details, safety contacts, and location (when you choose to share it). If you use social features, we store your friend connections and visibility preferences. We don't sell your data or share it with advertisers. See our Privacy Policy for complete details.
Go to Settings > Account and tap "Delete Account" at the bottom. This permanently deletes all your data including your profile, trips, contacts, friends, location history, and any other information. This action cannot be undone. Note: If you have an active Homebound+ subscription, you must cancel it separately through the App Store.
Yes, all users can export their data. Go to Settings > Privacy > "Export My Data" to download a copy of your trips, contacts, and profile information.
Make sure notifications are enabled for Homebound in your iPhone's Settings > Notifications > Homebound. In the app, check Settings > Notifications to confirm "Trip Reminders" and "Check-in Alerts" are on. Also note that a trip's "notification hours" can quiet reminders outside its set window, and Do Not Disturb or Focus modes can block alerts — though emergency (overdue) alerts are designed to break through regardless. If your safety contacts aren't receiving emails, have them check their spam/junk folder.
Open Settings > Notifications in the app. You can toggle "Trip Reminders" (alerts before a trip starts and as you approach your ETA) and "Check-in Alerts" (reminders to check in during a trip). Emergency notifications — the critical alerts for when you're overdue — are always on and can't be turned off, so a safety alert is never missed.
Location accuracy depends on GPS signal strength. Try moving to an area with clear sky view. Make sure Location Services are enabled for Homebound in Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services. If using live location, note that accuracy may vary in areas with poor GPS coverage like canyons or dense forests.
The important part still works. Your trip keeps running and your contacts are still notified if you don't check out by your ETA plus grace period — that happens on our servers, not on your phone.
What you give up: live location stops immediately, check-ins send without a position (so the map on your contacts' "Follow This Trip" page has nothing new to show), the overdue alert carries only the trip plan you set rather than where you actually were, arrival reminders stop, and place search can't centre on you.
"While Using" keeps most of that working. Only background live location and background arrival reminders need "Always".
Mostly, yes. Trip details are cached on your device so you can view them with no service, and actions you take offline — creating a trip, starting it, checking in, extending your ETA, checking out, even an SOS — are queued and sent automatically the moment you're back online.
The catch is that your contacts only hear about something once it actually sends. If you check out in a dead zone and don't regain signal before your ETA plus grace period, the overdue alert still goes out; your contacts get the "marked safe" update when you reconnect. For trips into no-service areas, set your ETA for when you expect to be back in coverage.
Check out as soon as possible to stop further notifications. Your contacts will receive an update that you've marked yourself safe. For future trips, consider setting a longer grace period to account for potential delays.
If your trip is taking longer than expected, open the active trip and tap "Extend ETA." You can add additional time (up to 4 hours) to your expected return. Your safety contacts will be notified of the updated ETA so they know not to worry.
Go to Settings > Resources and tap "Clear Cache." This removes locally cached data like trip details stored for offline access. Your account data on our servers is not affected.
Go to Settings > Help Make Homebound Better > Report a Bug, or visit our bug tracker at homebound.canny.io/bugs. You can also email us at feedback@homeboundapp.com. We appreciate every report!
Visit our feature request board at homebound.canny.io/feature-requests to submit and vote on feature ideas. You can also email feedback@homeboundapp.com.