The practical questions people ask before and after installing Mylo — getting started, what it costs, and how it works day to day. For privacy and security specifics, see the Security & Privacy FAQ.
No. Mylo has no accounts and no sign-up. When you first open the app it generates a private key on your device — that's your identity. There's no email, no phone number, and no password to create or remember.
Create a group, then invite people to it. You can share an invite as a QR code, a link, or a short 8-character code you can read aloud. Invites are single-use and expire within an hour, so a code can't be passed around or reused.
Yes — Mylo is its own app, so everyone you share with installs it and joins your group. Joining is always free; only the person who creates a group needs a subscription.
Yes. Mylo is one app on both platforms — same map, same groups, same end-to-end encryption. Nobody gets left off the map because of which phone they carry.
An iPhone on iOS 16 or later, or an Android phone on Android 7.0 or later. Mylo is a phone app — there's no web or desktop version, because your location lives on your phone.
Joining a group and using Mylo is always free. A subscription is only needed to create and host your own groups — so in a family or friend group, just one person (the organizer) subscribes and everyone they invite uses Mylo free.
It starts with a 1-month free trial, then $4.99/month or $39.99/year. One subscription covers up to 5 groups you organize. It's billed through the App Store or Google Play, so it applies per store — an iOS subscription doesn't carry over to an Android phone. See pricing for the full breakdown.
No, never. The payment screen only ever appears if you create your own group. If you're joining a family member's or friend's group, you won't see a price and can't be charged — it's enforced by how the app works, not just a policy.
Through your App Store (iOS) or Google Play (Android) subscription settings, anytime. If you cancel before your free trial ends, you won't be charged at all.
The group freezes: location sharing and alerts pause, and everyone sees a banner explaining why. Nothing is deleted — members, places, and alert rules are all preserved. The group picks up right where it left off when the organizer renews, or when ownership passes to a member who has a subscription.
Yes. The organizer can transfer ownership of a group to any member. The group then runs on the new owner's subscription — if they don't have one yet, the group stays frozen until they subscribe.
Mylo is designed to be light on battery. It publishes an update when you actually move (small movements are filtered out), plus a brief keepalive every 5 minutes to confirm you're still in the same spot — it doesn't poll your location constantly. On Android, Mylo asks to be exempted from battery optimization so the system doesn't kill it in the background.
Yes. Background location and geofencing keep sharing and alerts working when Mylo isn't open. On iOS this continues automatically; on Android a persistent notification keeps the background service alive. After an Android reboot, the service can't restart on its own, so Mylo sends a notification asking you to tap to resume.
Yes. You can be in your family group, your friend group, and a work group at once. Each group has its own map, its own saved places, and its own encryption key — members of one group see nothing about any other.
Yes. Create a time-limited sharing session with a name, start time, and duration — you can run more than one at once. Choose to track the whole time, only when nearby, or only once you've arrived. Everyone in the group is notified and can join with one tap, and when the event ends its data is deleted — no one has to remember to turn anything off.
Yes — pause anytime. Your location is deleted from the server immediately (no last-known snapshot is kept), you stay in the group, and nobody gets a notification. A banner reminds you that you're paused, and you resume with one tap.
Sharing is scoped to a whole group, and pausing pauses you for everyone in that group. If you want to share with different sets of people, put them in separate groups — each is independent, with its own members and map.
Save the places that matter — home, school, work — each with its own radius (or an oriented rectangle for campuses and complexes that aren't circles). Then set alerts to be notified when someone arrives at or leaves a place. Alerts fire even when the app is closed.
There's no flight number or itinerary to enter. Mylo's on-device evaluator — the same one that runs your place alerts — just recognizes the airport-to-airport hop from the live location your map already uses, so it notifies you the moment someone lands and works even through the mid-flight signal blackout.
Two sides, two controls, both off by default. To receive someone's landing notifications, turn on flight alerts for them on their member page — it's opt-in per person. To control whether your own flights get announced, there's a separate switch to stop announcing your flights that leaves all your other alerts untouched.
Yes, privately. Rename anyone in your group and give them your own photo or a colored initial — it's your view, stored on your phone, and it never changes how they appear to anyone else. How you appear to others is one name and avatar you set once.
Your groups aren't gone. On iOS your identity restores automatically from iCloud Keychain; on Android it usually restores via Block Store (this needs the same Google account, a screen lock, and Google backup enabled). Either way, save your 24-word recovery phrase — written down or as a QR code, it restores your identity on any device, no platform sync required. If you're an organizer, your subscription is tied to your identity and comes back with it; there's also a Restore Purchases option if the store needs a nudge. More detail is in the Security & Privacy FAQ.
No — and that's by design. We never see your recovery phrase or your keys, so only you can restore your account. Keep your recovery phrase somewhere safe; without it (and without platform sync) a lost device means your groups can't be recovered, because we can't decrypt them on your behalf.
Most location apps require an account tied to your email or phone number, and the service itself can read your location. Mylo can't — there's no account, everything is end-to-end encrypted before it leaves your device, only organizers pay, and there are no ads and no data to sell. More on the model is in the Security & Privacy FAQ.
Yes — it's built for families. Sharing is mutual (kids can see parents too, not just the other way around), it works across iPhone and Android, and arrival alerts mean a parent knows someone got home without anyone having to text. There's no public profile and no way for strangers to find anyone.
No. Sharing is strictly scoped to groups you belong to. There's no public profile, no discoverability, and no way for someone you haven't invited to find or view you.
No. Your location is encrypted on your device before it leaves your phone, and our servers store only ciphertext we have no key to read. See the Security & Privacy FAQ and privacy policy for exactly what we can and can't see.