Flock camera apps compared: alert apps, maps and the police app

Two different things share the name

Search "Flock camera app" and you get two kinds of result. One is Flock Safety's own app, which is a police tool. The rest are independent apps that show the public where plate readers are, built on the community map in OpenStreetMap. (There's also a 2012 photo-sharing app called Flock, from the makers of Bump. It has nothing to do with cameras.)

Disclosure up front: we make Flock Camera, one of the apps below. Every detail about the other apps comes from their own App Store listings, project pages or press coverage, linked where it appears, as of October 2026. Check the listing before you install, because these apps update often.

How many are in your town?

Look up

The official Flock Safety app is for police

Flock Safety's app is on the App Store, but the listing says the sign-in "does not support account creation"; an organization administrator has to set you up. Flock's launch post describes it as available to "law enforcement and security personnel with a Flock Safety account." It sends officers hot list alerts with vehicle photos, gunshot and other audio alerts, and runs plate lookups.

So if you want to know where cameras are, this isn't it. It's the other end of the system: it tells police when a camera has read a plate they're looking for.

Apps that alert you as you drive

Flock Camera and Flock Alert are the two built mainly around alerts. Both are iPhone apps, both are free to start, and neither needs an account.

Flock Alert's App Store listing says "everything is free," with optional supporter purchases from $0.99 to $24.99. It lists proximity alerts, a route planner, one-tap camera reporting, an alert history, a home-screen widget and weekly reports. A third-party app profile describes voice alerts and "in-view detection" as a $3.99/month Pro tier, which contradicts the listing, so check before you pay for anything. Its privacy label lists precise location and device ID as collected but not linked to you.

Where ours differs: view cones, a second alert when you enter a camera's field of view, and a History that marks encounters "likely captured". More on those below.

Apps for mapping and trip planning

DeFlock.me is the community's editor. Its listing describes a map showing camera direction and field of view, plus tools to add or correct cameras and send the edits to OpenStreetMap. The developer's privacy label says it collects no data. If a camera on your street is missing from every app, this is how you fix it for all of them at once, and our reporting guide walks through it.

FlockHopper and FlockDetour are route planners. Per CBS12, FlockHopper shows the fastest route next to one that passes fewer known cameras, with the counts for each, and says it calculates routes on the device. Its terms say the data may be incomplete and forbid using it to break the law. FlockDetour offers fastest, balanced and fewer-camera routes, with turn-by-turn navigation as a paid upgrade.

What none of them can do

They all draw from the same pool. FlockHopper, FlockDetour and DeFlock.me name OpenStreetMap as their source, and Flock Camera uses OpenStreetMap and DeFlock data. A camera nobody has mapped is missing from every app, and a wrong position is wrong everywhere. Comparing apps by camera count mostly compares how recently each one pulled the data.

None of them detects anything. By their own descriptions, every alert is your GPS position compared with a list of known positions. And none can tell you whether your plate was actually read or searched. Only the agency's records show that, which is why checking for searches takes a public records request, not an app.

Where Flock Camera fits

Flock Camera is the one to pick if you want alerts that account for which way a camera faces. It maps 155,157 plate readers worldwide and 143,415 in the US, covering Flock Safety (red pins) and every other brand (amber). Where a camera's facing direction is known, the app draws a view cone. In the data behind our map, that's 136,653 of the US cameras. A camera across the road pointing the other way isn't looking at your lane, and a dot can't show that.

Alerts run in the background with the phone in your pocket, at a distance you set between 200 m and 1.5 km, with a second alert when you enter a camera's field of view. The History logs each camera you pass and marks it "likely captured" when you were close and in front of the lens. That's a geometric estimate, not a confirmation, as our guide to being photographed explains.

Your location is compared against the map on the phone and never transmitted, and there's no account, no ads and no analytics in the app. It doesn't plan routes; you can look along a drive on the map yourself, as checking your route shows. It runs on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch with iOS 17 or later. On Android or a computer, the web map shows the same data in a browser, though it isn't the app.

Frequently asked questions