offstackIndependent software · reviewed by offstack
Starling
End-to-end encrypted location sharing for family and friends, with no accounts and no phone numbers.
About Starling
Starling is a free GPL-3.0 Android app for private live location sharing with a circle of family or friends, positioned by its maker as a Life360 alternative without the surveillance: live map, places with arrive/leave alerts, check-ins, low-battery heads-ups, SOS and a revocable help-beacon link. Positions are end-to-end encrypted on your phone (AES-256-GCM with rotating keys), so the default free hosted relay only moves ciphertext and deletes rows after 24 hours — no account, email or phone number; you invite with a one-time link and compare a safety number. You can point the app at your own relay instead. Map tiles come from OpenStreetMap when the street basemap is on (Off-grid draws locally with no tile requests). Get it from F-Droid as a reproducible build, or from GitHub releases; not on Google Play. iOS is build-from-source only and is not listed here. The encryption protocol has not had an independent outside audit yet, which the maker states openly.
