Dexcom G6

Review by eFreeware

If you wear a Dexcom G6 or G6 Pro sensor, this is the app that turns it into something you can read at a glance. It shows your glucose number and where it is heading, refreshing every five minutes, and it raises alarms and alerts when your level moves too low or too high. That combination of a live reading plus a warning is the reason most people would install it.

The audience is narrow and clearly stated: patients with type 1 or type 2 diabetes, and children from age 2 upward. The developer also positions the system for diabetes treatment decisions without fingersticks and without calibration, with the caveat that a fingerstick is still needed when symptoms do not match what the sensor shows. That caveat matters, and it is the kind of detail worth taking at face value rather than skimming.

This is not a general health tracker or a food log. It is the software half of a specific piece of hardware, and it only makes sense alongside that hardware. If you already have the sensor, the question is whether the app does its job well enough to rely on. That is what I look at below.

Readings and alerts during the day

The core loop is simple: a glucose value, a direction of travel, and alerts that fire when you cross thresholds you care about. Readings arrive every five minutes, which is frequent enough to see a trend forming rather than a single snapshot. For someone deciding whether to eat now or wait, or whether a walk is a good idea, that rhythm is the useful part.

The Alert Schedule feature is the piece I find most practical. It lets you set up a second, separate set of alerts, so the thresholds that make sense during working hours do not have to be the ones that apply for the rest of the day. Glucose alerts can also be set to vibrate only, and you can pick your own alert tones. That gives you a way to keep warnings present without every one of them being a full-volume event.

One exception stands out. The Urgent Low Alarm cannot be turned off, and the developer is explicit about that. It is a safety decision rather than an oversight, and it shapes how the app feels: you are not fully in control of when it makes noise. For most people that is the point, but it is worth knowing before you install.

Alerts that push through silent mode

The Always Sound setting is the other feature that defines daily life with this app. Enabled out of the box, it lets selected CGM alerts sound through silent, vibrate and Do Not Disturb modes. Calls and texts can still be muted while the glucose alarms remain audible.

These cover urgent low, high and low glucose, urgent low soon, and rate-of-change warnings. Those are the failures that would otherwise leave you without data and without knowing it, so the app treats them as non-negotiable.

A Home screen icon tells you whether your alerts will sound or not, which is a small touch that answers a question you would otherwise have to dig for. If you have ever silenced a phone for a meeting and then wondered whether your warnings were still live, that icon is the answer. The trade-off is that a phone set to Do Not Disturb is no longer fully quiet, and that is a deliberate design choice rather than a bug.

Sharing readings with family and caregivers

Share lets you send your glucose data in real time to as many as ten followers. Those followers use the separate Dexcom Follow app on their own compatible devices to watch the readings and trends as they happen. For a parent checking on a child overnight, or an adult child keeping an eye on a parent, this is the feature that turns a personal sensor into something a household can act on.

Both Share and Follow require an internet connection, so this is not something that works purely device to device. That is a real constraint if the person being followed spends time somewhere without reliable connectivity, and it is worth planning around rather than discovering later.

The app also connects to Health Connect so retrospective glucose data can be passed to third-party apps, and Quick Glance puts your glucose data on the lock screen so you can check it without opening anything. A compatible watch can receive alerts and alarms through Wear OS. Between them, these features mean you are not necessarily reaching for your phone every time you want a number.

What you need before any of this works

There is no version of this that works as a standalone glucose tracker. The sensor and transmitter are what generate the readings; the app is how you see and hear them.

Some features also depend on which system you have. Share, Follow, the Alert Schedule and the Always Sound setting are not available on the Dexcom G6 Pro System. If you are on the Pro side, the app still delivers readings and alerts, but the customization and the follower setup described above do not apply to you.

The app is free, with no ads and no in-app purchases. The cost sits with the hardware and supplies rather than the software. The app was released in April 2018 and the most recent update, dated August 27, 2026, is described simply as bug fixes and performance enhancements.

Where this app fits and where it asks for patience

The people who get the most from this app are those who want their glucose data visible without interrupting what they are doing, and who want to be warned before a low or a high becomes a problem. The Alert Schedule rewards anyone whose days have distinct phases, and Share is built for households where more than one person worries about the same readings.

It also suits caregivers as much as patients. A follower watching a child's overnight numbers is using the app exactly as intended, and the ten-follower limit is generous for a family. The vibrate-only option and the custom sounds give you room to make the alerts fit your environment rather than the other way around.

The app does ask for patience in one respect: the alerts are designed to be hard to ignore, and a few of them cannot be silenced at all. Anyone hoping to keep a phone completely quiet while still receiving glucose warnings will not get that here, and the Always Sound default means the app assumes it should be heard. That is the safety posture of the product, not a setting you can fully opt out of.

The install base is large, over a million, and the average rating sits at 2.9 from 14,179 ratings. That is a low figure for an app of this reach, and it tells you that a meaningful share of users have not been satisfied.

A companion app for people already wearing the sensor

My recommendation is straightforward. If you have a Dexcom G6 or G6 Pro system and you want your readings, trends and warnings on your phone, this app is the intended way to get them, and the alerting design shows real thought about what happens when a phone is silenced or a sensor fails. The five-minute refresh, the second alert schedule and the follower sharing cover the three things most people actually need.

If you are on the G6 Pro, go in knowing that some of the most appealing features do not apply to your system. And if the 2.9 average gives you pause, that is a fair reaction; it is worth checking what the current version does on your own device before you build a routine around it.

For the right user, the value is not in the app itself but in what it makes visible. A number every five minutes, a direction, and a warning that will not be silenced when it matters most. That is a narrow job, and it is the job this app exists to do.

What's new in version 1.17.0.331

Bug fixes and performance enhancements