Best Apps for LDS Missionary Families

Most families with a missionary out do not end up using one app. They end up using four or five, because the problems are genuinely different: working out how far through the mission someone is has nothing in common with getting a photo to a grandmother who does not use WhatsApp.

What follows is organised by problem rather than by product, because that is how these decisions actually get made. Under each one is the kind of tool that solves it and the trade-off that comes with it.

One thing to be upfront about: this article is published by Missionary Tracker, so it is not an independent review of Missionary Tracker. Where our own app is relevant we say what it does and leave you to judge it against the alternatives, most of which are free and several of which you already have installed.

Mission progress and countdown

This is the question families ask most and answer least consistently: how long have they been out, how long is left, and are they past halfway? All of it comes from two dates — the day they entered the field, and their expected release date — but those numbers change every single day, which is what makes them annoying to keep by hand.

The realistic options:

• A shared calendar. Put the release date in a family calendar with reminders on the milestones. Free, zero maintenance, and it will never tell you the percentage complete.
• A generic countdown app or home-screen widget. Fine for days remaining. Most count down to a date and stop there, so you get the number that is shrinking without the one that is growing.
• A spreadsheet. Genuinely capable — a couple of date formulas give you everything — but somebody has to build it and everyone else has to be able to open it.
• A purpose-built missionary tracker app. Holds both dates and derives days served, days remaining, percentage complete and the halfway point without anyone recalculating.

Missionary Tracker is the app we have built for this specific use case: a profile per missionary holding the two dates, with the countdown and progress updating on their own and showing the same figures to everyone following that profile. That last part is the difference from a widget — the numbers are not stuck on one person’s phone.

If you only want the numbers once, you do not need an app at all. The free missionary countdown calculator on this site works them out in your browser from the two dates, and will also generate a countdown card you can download and send to family.

Mission maps and serving areas

“Brazil São Paulo South Mission” means very little until you see it on a map. This matters more than families expect, especially for grandparents and younger siblings, because a mission name is an abstraction and a place is not.

Any general mapping app does most of this: search the mission headquarters or the area name, drop a pin, save it to a list. Google Maps and Apple Maps both let you keep a saved list you can share, which is a perfectly good free solution and has the advantage of showing you the surrounding geography — the coastline, the mountains, how far it is from the nearest city you have heard of.

Missionary Tracker shows the area a missionary is assigned to on a map, with every missionary you follow appearing together on the same view. For families with two or three out at once, seeing all of them in one place is the point.

Worth being clear about what this is and is not: a missionary map shows the serving area recorded on the profile. It is not live location, it does not follow anyone’s phone, and no app you should be using does. If something markets itself as tracking a missionary’s actual movements, that is a reason to walk away, not a feature. You can read more about how ours works on the missionary map page.

Family communication

Missionaries typically write once a week by email, with a call home on the schedule their mission sets. The app question is not how the missionary writes — that is largely decided for them — but how the news travels once it arrives.

Email

Still the backbone. Gmail, Outlook and everything else handle it equally well; the useful habit is a dedicated label or folder from week one, so the whole mission sits in one searchable place at the end. Email is also the only channel that reliably reaches every relative regardless of what phone they own.

Group chats

WhatsApp, Messenger, iMessage, Telegram, Signal — pick whichever your family already uses, because migrating people to a new messaging app is harder than any other item in this article. Group chats are excellent for immediacy and conversation and poor as a record: they are hard to search after two years, photos get compressed, and anyone added later sees none of the history.

Something durable alongside it

The pattern that works is a chat for talking and one durable place for the record. Which durable place is less important than picking one. We went through the options in detail in how to share missionary updates with family and friends.

Shared photos

Two years of preparation-day photos is a lot of material, and the default outcome is that it lives in one parent’s camera roll at messaging-app resolution.

• Shared cloud albums — iCloud Shared Albums and Google Photos shared albums both let several people add to one album and everyone else browse it whenever they like, at full quality. Google Photos has the edge for mixed-platform families since it works properly on both iPhone and Android.
• A shared drive folder — Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive if you want the originals filed by month or by area rather than in one long scroll. More effort, better archive.
• A photo book at the end — not an app you use during the mission, but worth knowing that most print services want full-resolution files, which is an argument for saving originals somewhere as you go rather than screenshotting them from a chat later.

Whichever you choose, set it up in the first month. Photos are the thing families most regret not organising, and it is close to impossible to reconstruct eighteen months of them retrospectively.

Time zones

If the missionary is serving internationally, the recurring small problem is knowing whether it is a reasonable hour where they are — before a scheduled call, or just to picture what they are doing.

Every phone already solves this: add their city to the Clock app’s world clock and it sits next to your own time permanently. Both iOS and Android will also show a second time zone on the lock screen or in a widget. There is no need to install anything.

A dedicated app helps in one case: when the mission moves. Areas change every few transfers and occasionally cross a time zone, and a world clock pinned to the wrong city is worse than none. Missionary Tracker shows the current local time and weather for the area on the profile, so it follows the transfers rather than needing to be re-pinned — a small thing, but it is the kind of small thing that otherwise goes stale.

Missionary updates

Beyond the weekly letter there is a running stream of smaller news: a transfer, a new companion, a baptism, a change of area, a milestone reached. This is the material that makes a mission feel like a story rather than a countdown, and it is also the most likely to be scattered across three conversations and lost.

What you want is somewhere that keeps updates in order, that people can read without being sent them, and that a relative joining in month ten can scroll back through. A blog, a shared note, a private social account or an app profile all do this. What none of the general-purpose options do is attach the update to the mission context — where they were and how far through they were when it happened.

That is what the missionary updates tab in our app is for: posts sit on the missionary’s profile alongside the countdown and the serving area, and everyone following the profile sees them without anyone forwarding anything.

Keeping everything together

You can assemble all of the above from free tools you already have: a calendar for the dates, a maps list for the areas, a group chat for the news, a shared album for the photos, a world clock for the time zone. Plenty of families do exactly that and it works.

The cost is maintenance and dispersion. Five tools means five things to keep current, and it means the answer to “how long has she got left, and where is she now?” lives in two different apps and one person’s memory. Over eighteen to twenty-four months, the pieces that need a human to keep them up to date are the pieces that quietly stop being accurate.

The argument for a single mission-specific tool is that the dates, the progress, the area, the local time and the updates are all facets of one thing, and separating them across five apps is what creates the work. Missionary Tracker is the app we’ve built specifically for keeping a missionary’s journey, progress, serving area and updates together — one profile per missionary, shared with family, friends or a whole ward by join code, free on iPhone and Android.

It is not a replacement for a group chat, and it does not try to be. It replaces the calendar entry, the spreadsheet, the pinned map and the mental arithmetic.

A reasonable starting setup

1. Record the entry date and expected release date on day one, and note which start date you are counting from.
2. Create a dedicated email label or folder for the weekly letters before the first one arrives.
3. Start a shared photo album that works on both iPhone and Android, and add everyone who will want it.
4. Add their city to your phone’s world clock, or use something that follows their transfers.
5. Pick one durable home for the record of the mission, and tell the family where it is once.

If you want to start with the numbers, the free missionary countdown calculator needs nothing but the two dates and will generate a shareable countdown card in a few seconds. For the wider version of this — what to record, how to follow transfers, who to keep in the loop — see how to keep track of an LDS missionary’s mission, or explore Missionary Tracker’s features.