General question about location sharing and FindMy app

The People tab shows who’s sharing their location with you. The Devices tab shows your kid’s Apple Watch itself, as a device.

Even if it’s the same thing, Find My splits it up, person and device, which can cause weird time differences for last known location updates. This happens with my wife and kid sometimes. My wife has multiple devices, whereas my kid just has a tablet. If I click on my child within the People tab, it’ll pull the device location of the tablet, which would be seen also within the Devices tab.

The Apple Watch with cellular can share location on its own, but it's not constantly pinging like an iPhone. It updates only when it really needs to (during active use, movement, or when the location of it is checked). This assists with saving the battery.

If your kid’s not using the watch much or it’s in low-power mode, it might not update often. That’s why it sometimes says “not sharing location” or shows last update some time ago.

You can’t force a location update from your side. A possible way that you could trigger a location check-in calling. This would wake the watch.

If the goal is having real-time location, the Watch might not give you that level of consistency.

lukasz189 wrote:

Thank you for the answer. What a pitty. I bought to my kid apple devices, because it was said, that apple watch is the best kid tracker, but im a bit disappointed.

I'm not sure who told you that. The primary purpose of an Apple Watch is not so that you can track kids (or anyone). That's more of an additional benefit.

Some thoughts. Do you have restrictions set up so that your child can't turn off location services? It's possible that your child is somewhere where location services are partially blocked.