If location tracking, location alerts, or check-ins are showing your child's location as farther away than they actually are, let's check their location settings. Many of these location settings are enabled by default on a Bark Phone, but it's worth confirming they're set correctly.
Note that if Power Saving Mode is enabled in their battery settings, location updates will only come through about once per minute by design — if that's the case and you're okay with that behavior, no changes are needed.
Interactive Troubleshooter
Text Instructions
- Open up your parent app / dashboard.
- Now grab your kid's Bark Phone.
-
Open their Settings app.
Seeing "Contact your parent for access"?
Tap your child. Scroll down and tap Bark Watch & Phone > Settings > enable. - Tap Location.
- Tap Location Services.
- Turn on Emergency Location Service, Google Location Accuracy, Wi-Fi scanning, and Bluetooth scanning.
- Tap < back twice.
- Tap Apps > Bark Guard Dog.
- Enter a device code if prompted. Then, tap the ||| button on the bottom navigation to go back to where you were in Settings.
- Tap Mobile Data.
- Toggle on Allow background data usage and Allow data usage while Data saver is on.
- Tap < back.
- Tap Battery > select Unrestricted.
- Tap < back twice and tap the
Bark Kids app.
- Tap Mobile Data.
- Toggle on Allow background data usage and Allow data usage while Data saver is on.
- Tap < back.
- Tap Battery > select Unrestricted.
- Tap < back a few times to get to the home page of the Settings app.
- Tap Battery.
- Turn off Power saving.
- Then, tap Background usage limits.
-
Turn off Put unused apps to sleep.
That's it! You've now checked that they have the best settings for location accuracy.
Getting repeated alerts even when the device hasn't moved?
If you're getting a bunch of arrival or departure alerts even though the device is staying in one place, it could be due to small changes in how the GPS is reporting the location. This can happen when signal is weak — like inside buildings or during bad weather — and may cause the location to "jump" slightly on the map.
A quick fix is to increase the radius of the favorite location. That way, small location shifts won’t trigger unnecessary alerts.
Learn how to adjust the radius of a location