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Find My iPhone & Apple Device Tracking Find My troubleshooting

Find My Friends Location Not Updating? Here Is the Fix

Usually it is the other person's phone, not yours. Low Power Mode, Location Services, and a stale timestamp explain most cases. The five checks that fix it.

By Martin Pavlič · May 31, 2026 ·8 min read
A phone on a cafe table showing a map with a single dot, an empty chair across the table, soft daylight, no readable text
On this page 6 sections

A friend’s dot has not moved in two hours. You open Find My, pull to refresh, and the same spot stares back with a timestamp from lunch. Before you assume the worst, here is the part most guides bury: the problem is usually on the other person’s phone, not yours, and the two most common causes are Low Power Mode and a lost connection.

Find My never invents a position. It shows the last spot a phone reported and stamps it with the time. When that phone cannot get a signal, sits in Low Power Mode, or has sharing switched off, your screen freezes on the old dot. Below is what each state means, the five checks that fix most cases, and how to tell a frozen location from one that has been quietly turned off.

TL;DR

  • It is usually their phone. Their Low Power Mode, dead signal, or Share My Location toggle, not your app.
  • A timestamp means stale, not broken. The dot is the last known spot, honestly dated.
  • Grayed out or No Location Found means the phone is off, in Airplane Mode, or out of signal right now.
  • Five checks fix most cases: connection, Low Power Mode, Location Services, Share My Location, restart.

What “not updating” actually means

Find My has three failure states, and they are not the same problem. Reading the screen correctly saves you from chasing the wrong fix.

  • An old dot with a timestamp. The phone reported this spot, then stopped sending new ones. The location is real but stale. The cause is almost always a weak signal or Low Power Mode.
  • A grayed-out name or “No Location Found.” Find My cannot reach the phone at all. It is off, in Airplane Mode, out of coverage, or sharing has been turned off. There is no dot to show.
  • “Location Not Available.” Similar to No Location Found, often during a sign-in problem or right after a restart, before the phone has reported its first fix.

The single most useful thing on the screen is the timestamp under the name. “Now” or “a few minutes ago” is healthy. Two hours old is a signal problem, not an app problem. For the difference between these messages on your own device, the breakdown in find my iphone no location found goes deeper.

The five checks that fix most cases

Run these in order. The first two solve the clear majority of stuck locations, and you can do all five in about five minutes.

  1. Check the connection and kill Low Power Mode. A phone with no Wi-Fi or cellular cannot report anything. Low Power Mode then throttles the background updates Find My depends on, so even a connected phone goes quiet. Turn Low Power Mode off in Settings, Battery. This pair is the fix more often than anything else.
  2. Turn Location Services on. Open Settings, Privacy & Security, Location Services. The master switch must be on, and Find My should be set to While Using the App or Always. If the master switch is off, every location feature on the phone goes dark.
  3. Confirm Share My Location is on. In Settings, tap your name, then Find My, and check that Share My Location is on. Note the From device at the bottom. If that points at an old iPad or a second phone, the device in your pocket is not the one reporting.
  4. Force a fresh fix. Open the Find My app and pull the People list down to refresh. If nothing changes, toggle Airplane Mode on and off. That drops and rebuilds the network connection, which pushes the phone to report a new location.
  5. Restart the phone. When a location is still frozen after the first four steps, a plain restart clears it. This is the boring fix that works when the others do not.
Two location dots, one bright and current, one faded with a faint ring suggesting an old timestamp
A timestamp is Find My being honest: the dot is the last spot the phone reported, not a live feed.

When the problem is the other person’s phone

If your own phone is sharing fine and you still see a stale dot for someone else, the checks above belong to them, not you. You cannot fix another person’s connection, Low Power Mode, or toggles from your device.

The honest move is to text them: ask whether their phone has signal, whether Low Power Mode is on, and whether Share My Location is still turned on. People turn sharing off by accident after a software update, when a phone resets settings, or when they swap to a new device and never re-enable it. None of that is sinister, and none of it shows up as an error on your screen. It just looks like a frozen dot.

There is one case worth naming plainly. If a location has been stuck for a long stretch while the person is clearly active, replying to messages, posting, online, then sharing has most likely been switched off rather than frozen by signal. A phone with enough connection to send texts has enough to report a location.

Find My Friends is now just the Find My app

A lot of confusion comes from old habits. Apple folded Find My Friends and Find My iPhone into one app called Find My back in 2019, with iOS 13. There is no separate Find My Friends app to download anymore. If you are hunting for that old icon, you will not find it.

People sharing now lives under the People tab inside Find My. Devices live under the Devices tab. If a guide tells you to open Find My Friends, mentally translate that to “open Find My, then People.” The toggles are the same, the name on the box changed.

The notification trick that forces an update

There is a quiet fix that works when a dot keeps going stale. Open Find My, go to the People tab, tap the person, and under Notifications tap Add. Set an alert for when they arrive at or leave a place.

Adding a notification makes Find My poll that person’s location more actively, and for many people it shakes a stubborn dot loose and keeps it current afterward. It is not magic, it just nudges the app to check more often than its default rhythm. You can delete the alert later if you do not want it.

When a location is genuinely stuck

Some frozen locations are not a bug to fix. They are the phone telling the truth about its own state.

A device that is off, dead, in Airplane Mode, or with no coverage cannot report, full stop. A phone that is signed out of iCloud, or where the owner chose Stop Sharing My Location, drops off entirely instead of freezing. And right after an iOS update or a restart, expect a few minutes of “Location Not Available” before the first fix lands. If you have run the five checks, confirmed the other person is sharing, and the dot still will not move, the phone is almost certainly offline rather than broken. The history in iphone shows wrong location causes covers the related case where the dot updates but lands in the wrong spot, and the wider setup is in the find my iphone complete guide.

Questions & answers

Things readers ask about this

6 questions · updated May 2026

Why is my friend's location not updating on Find My?
Most often the problem is on their phone, not yours. Their device may be in Low Power Mode, off Wi-Fi and cellular, has Location Services turned off, or has Share My Location switched off. Find My only shows the last position their phone reported. If that phone cannot get a signal or is told not to share, your screen freezes on the old spot with a timestamp. Ask them to check their connection and that Share My Location is on.
Does Low Power Mode stop location sharing?
Yes, in practice it often does. Low Power Mode cuts background activity to save battery, and that includes the background refresh Find My uses to push a new location. The dot can sit unchanged for hours until the person opens an app or charges the phone. This is one of the two most common reasons a location stops updating. Turning Low Power Mode off usually brings the location back within a minute or two.
How often does Find My update a location?
There is no fixed timer. Find My updates when the phone moves and has a connection, often every few minutes while someone is traveling, and far less when they sit still or are on a weak signal. A timestamp under the name tells you how fresh the dot is. 'Now' or 'a few minutes ago' is normal. Hours old usually means the phone lost signal, went into Low Power Mode, or was switched off.
What does a grayed-out name or No Location Found mean?
A grayed-out name and No Location Found both mean Find My cannot reach that phone right now. The device is off, out of signal, in Airplane Mode, or has location sharing turned off. It is different from an old dot with a timestamp, which is the last known spot. No Location Found shows nothing at all. Wait for the phone to reconnect, or ask the person to confirm sharing is still on.
Can someone freeze or fake their Find My location?
Yes. A person can pause sharing without telling you by opening Find My, tapping their own card, and choosing Stop Sharing My Location, which makes them disappear rather than freeze. Some also use a second phone as the From device so the one in their pocket no longer reports. Paid apps that spoof GPS exist too. If a location has been stuck for a long time while messages go through, sharing has likely been turned off.
Why does Find My show an old location with a timestamp?
The timestamp is Find My being honest. It shows the last spot the phone reported and when, instead of guessing. A dot from two hours ago means the phone has not sent a new fix since then, usually because it lost signal, sat in Low Power Mode, or was off. It is not a glitch. When the phone reconnects and has data, the dot and the timestamp update on their own within a minute.