Loci.st iPhone tracker: review

The Bottom Line: A cool app based on sharing your location, much like “position tweeting”. The concept falls like dominos if you have a friend that doesn’t tweet regularly”

Location technologies:

GPS – Yes
Wi-fi access points – No
Cell-towers – No

Accuracy/reliability:

Fairly good, the app uses the GPS of the iPhone. You can also choose what accuracy you want to list your position as. However the “person in the center” is positioned with GPS so the accuracy of that position is often 5-10 meters off in bigger cities.

When you choose an accuracy of 800 meters for example the circle around gets bigger, though you can still zoom in on the center. The icon gets smaller and therefore shows the exact location anyway, a programming fault that makes the accuracy setting useless.

Availability/Versatility:

Available on the iPhone only.

Ease of use:

The app is more similar to the “check-in” feature that already exists on Facebook and you are meant to share your location with your friends only. It is hard to position friends that don’t like tweeting and updating every second, therefore this app is hard to use in a passive positioning sense where you want location data constantly to be coming in (i.e. real-time location data).

Design:

Looks really good and professional; it looks like the developers have spent a lot of time and money developing this app. Big plus for that. The homepage looks a lot better than the personal page which looks very much like a BETA version compared to the rest of the app. The icon/personal image is pixelated and looks terrible. It ruins the look and feel of the rest of the app.

Privacy:

Good privacy, you can go to “Personal settings” and change how you want to show your position. Plus they have a “Privacy policy”.

Pricing:

Free

Refunds/guarantees:

Not relevant since it is free, they have a “Terms of service”.