📣Lost pets and sightings

This is the one part of PetLover that is free on every plan, for everyone, always. A lost dog is not a premium feature, and you do not even need to own a pet to help someone find theirs.

Reporting your pet as missing

1. Open the pet's profile and tap Report as lost.
2. Drop the pin where the pet went missing — the park, the vet, the motorway services on a trip. It is not your home address, and it is not where you are standing now.
3. Choose how far the alert should reach. 5 km by default, up to 25.
4. Add a phone number people can call, and anything that helps: what it was wearing, whether it is scared of strangers, whether it needs medication.

The moment you confirm, everyone using PetLover inside that radius gets a notification. There is nothing else to press.

What the neighbours see

The photo, the name, the species, what you wrote, the phone you gave, and how far away the pet went missing. They do not see your name, your email, your account or where you live. Nothing in PetLover ever shows one user's identity to another.

The pin you dropped is public while the report is active — that is the whole point of it — which is exactly why it is the place the pet was lost and not your home.

I saw a lost pet — how do I help?

Open the alert and tap I saw it. You mark on the map where you saw the animal, and you can add a note — which way it was heading, whether it looked hurt, whether someone picked it up — and a phone number if you are happy to be called.

The owner gets it immediately. Only the owner sees sightings: what you report guides the person looking, not the whole neighbourhood.

You can also open the map yourself, from the alerts screen, and look at what is active around any point — not only where you are. Handy before heading to a park.

The trail

Each sighting is a dot on the owner's map with its time. Three sightings in an afternoon stop being three notifications and become a direction. That is why it is worth reporting a sighting even when you think somebody surely already did — the second one is what turns the first into a trail.

Receiving alerts

To be told about a pet lost near you, two things have to be true: alerts switched on in Settings, and location permission granted to the app.

• We never ask for background location. The app reads your position when you open it, and that is enough — receiving a notification needs no location permission at all.
• Your position is never shown to anyone. It answers one question, once: is this person near a pet that just went missing?
• Turn alerts off and the stored position is deleted from our servers, not just hidden.
• If you revoke location permission in your phone's settings, the app notices on the next launch and turns the switch off by itself, instead of leaving it on with nothing behind it.

When the pet comes home

Open the report and mark it as found — or cancelled, if you reported it by mistake. The alert stops existing for everyone: it disappears from the map, from the nearby list and from any notification that had not been opened yet.

Please do close it. An alert nobody ever closes is what teaches people to ignore the next one.

Why don't I get any alerts?

• Nobody has reported a pet missing within your radius. This is by far the most common reason, and the good one.
• Alerts are off in Settings, or the app has no location permission.
• Notifications are blocked for PetLover in your phone's settings.
• You have not opened the app since installing it: until then there is no position to compare against.