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Troy Hunt has a great write-up about one such product from easily this year: https://www.troyhunt.com/how-to-track-your-kids-and-other-peoples-kids-with-the-tic

• mikestew 7y ago
  And he comes to the same conclusion I did: skip the cheap-ass commodity shit and go buy an Apple Watch. Series 3 can be had for US$200, plus the matching phone. Yeah, that’s a shit-ton of money. That’s what it costs to track your child and not get something from a company that scrimped on security to have an office party (documented in the article). Because the whole time I’m reading the article thinking, “oh, c’mon, I could scrape together capital to do better than that. Ain’t gonna be $69 at Wal-Mart, though.” As I designed it in my head, I realized that for $200 I’d redesigned what Apple already sells, and my low volume would have a hard time beating $200 on cost.
  • nkrisc 7y ago
    Well said. Despite all the valid criticism of Apple in general, you can still be reasonably sure there's not an admin panel with an admin:admin login sitting there with all your child's data. That's part of what you're paying for.
  • crooked-v 7y ago
    Watch-and-phone location sharing is a bit superfluous, since the phone will do it fine by itself. I could see a future hypothetical standalone Apple Watching serving well in this role as a 'cheap' alternative to a smartphone, since it can already do audio Facetime calls over cellular, do basic SMS stuff, stream music, etc, while being nigh-useless for games (a factor that some parents would probably value pretty highly). The only reason one can't use it for that purpose already is the required phone tethering.