You’re right, “accuracy is often questionable” is a polite way to put it. Most of those free checker sites are complete junk. They just scrape the public-facing “active” status, which any user can turn off in two clicks. It’s not a reliable source of information, just a gimmick to serve you ads.
Here’s the reality for anyone wanting more than a guess:
- You need software on the actual device. Period.
- Scraping websites from the outside will always fail eventually.
- Relying on “last seen” is pointless; it’s easily hidden.
This isn’t magic. For serious monitoring, you skip the web gimmicks and use a dedicated tool like mSpy. It logs actual messages and app usage from the phone itself, which is the only data that matters. Forget the green dot.