Get Notified When Someone Arrives: Arrival Alerts Set Up Right

Three tools send you an automatic push notification when a family member arrives at a specific place. They work very differently. Apple’s Find My has the most reliable geofence trigger on iPhone-to-iPhone setups, with a built-in consent approval flow. Google Maps location sharing includes arrival alerts that work across iPhone and Android, but the option is buried and easy to miss. Google Family Link is the right answer for supervised child accounts on Android, with arrival notifications built into the parental dashboard. Everything else is a third-party app.

The detail most guides skip: on Find My, recurring notifications require the other person’s explicit approval. They see a prompt the first time they arrive at the location you configured and must tap Approve before any alerts fire. That is not a bug. It is the consent mechanism, and it matters.

Key Takeaways

• Find My sends arrival/departure push notifications on iPhone with consent approval from the tracked person.
• Google Maps has arrival alerts too, but they are not native geofence triggers. They rely on the tracked person’s app reporting location updates.
• Google Family Link is the right tool for supervised Android accounts under 13, with parental arrival notifications built in.
• None of these work if the phone is offline or has location access revoked.
• All three require the tracked person to have agreed to share their location in the first place. No exceptions.

What each platform actually supports

The table below answers the three questions parents and partners ask most:

Find My: the cleanest option for iPhone families

Find My is the right tool if everyone in the family uses an iPhone. The arrival notification is built in, requires nothing extra to install, and is precise enough to distinguish “arrived at the school building” from “pulled into the parking lot a block away.”

Before you set it up, location sharing must already be active. If you have not shared location yet, open Find My, tap People, then Share My Location and send an invite. The other person accepts, and you both appear on each other’s map. That step is covered in our two-way location sharing guide.

Once you can see them in the People tab:

1. Tap their name.
2. Scroll to Notifications and tap Add.
3. Tap Notify Me.
4. Choose Arrives or Leaves (you can add both as separate notifications).
5. Select a location. Home, Work, and School pull from your saved contacts addresses. Tap New Location to drop a custom pin.
6. Adjust the radius. The default medium radius covers roughly one city block, which is right for a school or a home.
7. Tap Add.

The approval step is where most parents get confused. After you save the notification, nothing fires immediately. Your kid’s phone shows an alert the first time they arrive at or leave that location, asking them to approve the recurring notification. If they tap Approve, alerts start. If they dismiss it or ignore it, no alerts fire. They can revoke approval at any time from Find My on their own device.

This is intentional. Apple’s privacy framework for Find My notifications is built around mutual awareness: the person being tracked knows a notification exists, knows who receives it, and controls whether it continues. For family setups where the arrangement is openly agreed to, this is a small one-time friction. For setups where you were hoping to be invisible, it will not work.

A few things to know about Find My notifications in practice:

• Multiple locations per person. You can set arrival at school, departure at school, arrival at home, and departure from home: four separate notifications, all from one contact card.
• Notifications survive phone restarts. Once approved, the geofence persists until you or the other person removes it.
• Battery level is visible. On the People card, Find My shows the current battery percentage of the tracked device alongside location, which is useful for the “are they on their way home or did the phone die” question.
• Apple Watch integration. If you wear an Apple Watch, Find My arrival notifications appear on the wrist, no phone check required.

For a broader walkthrough of how to set up the parent-child location sharing stack, see our guide to tracking your kid’s phone.

Google Maps: cross-platform but less precise

Google Maps arrival alerts work when one person has an iPhone and the other has Android. That is their main use case. Both people need Google accounts and the Google Maps app, and one person must have shared their location with the other first.

To turn on arrival and departure notifications:

1. Open Google Maps on your phone.
2. Tap your profile picture in the top right.
3. Tap Location sharing.
4. Tap the profile card of the person whose location you can see.
5. In the Notifications section, tap Add.
6. Under Choose a location, pick a saved address or add a new one.
7. Choose Every time they arrive, Every time they depart, or both.
8. Tap Save.

You will receive a Google Maps push notification when that person’s phone reports their location within the geofence. The person being tracked does not receive a separate notification that you configured this. They already know you have location access because they approved the share.

The limitation to understand: Google Maps location updates are not always real-time. The app reports location on a schedule that balances battery life and accuracy, which means the arrival notification can lag by a few minutes. Find My uses a more aggressive on-device geofence trigger that fires as soon as the device crosses the boundary. For time-sensitive situations (knowing exactly when the bus drops your kid off), Find My is more reliable. For general awareness (“did they make it to grandma’s?”), Google Maps is fine.

Google Maps also has no native geofence for your own location. You cannot set a reminder that fires when you yourself enter or leave a place. That is an iOS Shortcuts feature (see below), not a Maps feature.

Google Family Link: for supervised Android accounts

If your child has an Android phone and is under 13 (or you have set up parental supervision through Google Family Link), arrival notifications live inside the Family Link app, not Google Maps.

Family Link gives parents a dashboard with the child’s location, app activity, and screen time. The location card inside Family Link has a Manage locations section where you can add home, school, or any custom address and toggle arrival and departure alerts.

The key difference from the Maps setup: Family Link is a supervised account structure. The child’s Google account is managed by the parent’s. Location access is not something the child can revoke from their device. A persistent notification on the child’s phone (“Your account is supervised by [parent]”) is always visible. Family Link does not support hidden monitoring, and Google’s Family Link support documentation is explicit about this.

For children over 13 who have a standard Google account, Family Link supervision requires the child’s opt-in, and they can choose to remove it. At that point the Google Maps sharing setup (described above) becomes the right approach.

iOS Shortcuts: geofence for your own arrivals

There is a fourth option that none of the platforms above cover: getting notified yourself when you arrive somewhere, or automatically sending a message to someone when you arrive. This is an iOS Shortcuts feature.

Open the Shortcuts app, tap the Automation tab, then New Automation, and choose Arrive or Leave from the location options. You can set it to send a text, run a shortcut, or trigger a notification, all automatically when your own phone crosses a geofenced boundary. This is how to automate “I’m home” texts without typing anything.

It is not a family monitoring tool in the Find My sense. It runs on your device, for your arrivals, sending whatever action you program. But for the common scenario (a parent who wants to know when they themselves leave work so their partner can start dinner), it is faster to set up than any shared location feature.

What can go wrong

Location access revoked on the tracked device. The single most common reason arrival alerts stop working. On iPhone: Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > Find My must be set to Always. On Android: the Maps or Family Link app permission must be set to Allow all the time. Battery optimization settings on Android (which restrict background app activity) are a second frequent culprit.

Phone is offline. If the device has no internet when it crosses the geofence boundary, the location update never reaches the server and no alert fires. Find My will display the last known location with a timestamp. Google Maps will show the same. A quick text when they arrive is still the most reliable backup for critical check-ins like a child arriving home alone for the first time.

Approval never tapped. On Find My, if the other person dismissed the approval prompt without tapping Approve, recurring notifications are off. Check by tapping their name in Find My. If the notification is listed but marked as waiting, it has not been approved. Ask them to open Find My on their own device and look under Notifications.

Geofence radius too small. If the radius is set to the minimum, the alert fires only when the phone is almost exactly at the center point (inside the building, not in the parking lot). For schools and workplaces, medium radius is more reliable. For a home, minimum or medium both work.

The consent note

Every method above requires the tracked person to know they are being tracked. Find My makes this explicit through the approval flow. Google Maps requires an accepted share invitation. Family Link shows a permanent supervision notice on the child’s phone. There is no setup in this guide that is invisible to the other person, and that is correct.

If you are setting this up for a teenager, the guide to tracking your kid’s phone has the conversation framework to run before you touch any settings: why the alert exists, what you will do with the information, when it goes away. The technical setup takes five minutes. The conversation is what makes it work long-term.

For couples wanting to share location in both directions, see the guide to sharing your location with your partner for the mutual-setup steps and the five questions to agree on before the apps open.

The best arrival alert is the one both people understand, agreed to, and know how to turn off.