Google killed Maps Timeline, so I self-hosted a greater one

As an avid traveler, Google Maps Timeline has lengthy been one in all my favourite hidden options. I’m used to opening it on sluggish Sunday afternoons and wandering via my very own journey historical past. It confirmed alleyways I had forgotten, lengthy layovers that blurred collectively whereas stepping out for a fast brunch throughout a brand new metropolis, and impulsive last-minute rail journeys throughout Japanese Europe that by no means made it into photographs. It’s at all times felt like a personal journey diary logging all over the place I’ve been.

So the announcement that Google will probably be killing Timeline view as we all know it got here as a little bit of a shock. The web timeline view is now not accessible, and the one copy lives in your telephone — until you explicitly set off a cloud backup. As with all issues Google, if a characteristic is just too good, it will definitely will get killed (even when it’s within the identify of privateness). For all sensible functions, Google was about to maneuver a decade and a half of my location historical past behind a Takeout export. In different phrases, I might obtain my previous travels or watch them vanish. If I cared about these recollections, it was clear that I had to determine a approach to take possession of that knowledge. So I did the apparent: I seemed up a self-hosted different.

Even at first look, OwnTracks seemed like the suitable device. It’s open supply, it really works solely on private infrastructure, and it shops knowledge in plain textual content. The interface in all fairness polished, and there’s no hidden monetization. All of which is strictly what I wished in a Google Maps Timeline substitute.

Setting it up took a weekend of tinkering on my Synology NAS, however the payoff was a location log that lives on {hardware} I’ve already paid for. I can select what to do with that knowledge, together with integrating it with House Assistant, and I can again it up wherever and as usually as I like. Win-win.

Getting began with OwnTracks is an concerned course of, so I started with the fundamentals. It wants an MQTT dealer to shuttle messages between the telephone app and the server. I put in Eclipse Mosquitto in a Docker container. The documentation is evident sufficient about ports and quantity mounts. As soon as the dealer was working, I pointed the OwnTracks app on my Pixel 9 Professional to the NAS’s LAN IP and watched as JSON packets started showing within the logs. Whereas I’m high-quality with syncing my location historical past each time I’m again residence, you can too arrange a reverse proxy and replace your location in actual time. Maybe a undertaking for an additional time.

The second step was storage and playback. OwnTracks is cut up into two components: the recorder, which, effectively, information your location, and the frontend, which shows it. The recorder connects to the MQTT dealer we put in earlier, writes each replace to disk, and exposes an HTTP API. Putting in it was simple with Docker Compose, and you can too use Synology’s Container Supervisor for an excellent simpler setup. By default, the recorder serves a primary map on port 8083. It’s not flashy, but it surely works. I noticed my night stroll pop up nearly in actual time. And for those who’re simply trying to log your location from right here on out, you possibly can skip the frontend altogether. If importing your Timeline historical past is necessary to you, prefer it was to me, you’ll wish to proceed putting in the frontend. The method is just like putting in the recorder and shouldn’t take over an hour.

Paired with the OwnTracks app on Android or iOS, the system additionally works offline. If the web drops otherwise you haven’t arrange exterior entry, the information nonetheless lands in your NAS or residence server as quickly as your telephone reconnects to the MQTT dealer.

It must be mentioned that Google doesn’t make it straightforward to import your previous location knowledge. After working the export via Google Takeout, importing my previous knowledge took fairly a little bit of wrangling. Takeout handed me a folder of JSON information, and it took a neighborhood script to transform these into the format the recorder expects. As soon as that was finished, I piped in a decade’s price of travels over to OwnTracks, restarted the service, and watched because it quietly added all the pieces into the database. It wasn’t frictionless, however as soon as it labored, it felt like stepping again into Google’s previous timeline view, besides this time, all the pieces was self-hosted.

Regardless of the trouble concerned in organising OwnTracks, the tip consequence makes it price it. The method taught me all of the variables that go into getting the service working and jogged my memory why self-hosting feels liberating. If I ever have to troubleshoot issues, it ought to be pretty trivial, and each repair is kind of remaining. I can select to by no means replace the service till a significant launch. Extra particularly, Google can’t mark my NAS as deprecated. Which, you’d have realised by now, is a characteristic in itself. Moreover, if I wish to tweak one thing, I can learn the supply code and add it in.

Coming to the expertise of utilizing OwnTracks, it, predictably, isn’t as full-featured as a product by Google. All you get is a map with location markers displaying the place you’ve been. For the reason that service leverages OpenStreetMaps, the information isn’t as full-featured both. So, this won’t be your finest guess for those who’re attempting to pinpoint an previous restaurant you visited a decade in the past, or anticipate add-ons like Avenue View to stroll again in your individual steps.

However for all its limitations, OwnTracks does a terrific job of serving to you visualize the place you had been at a selected cut-off date. Relying in your wants, that is perhaps sufficient. Whereas OwnTracks doesn’t provide heatmaps or journey labels, it does provide one thing extra necessary: permanence. The info sits in JSON information, neatly organized by 12 months and month. Any mapping library can learn it. If I need a heatmap, I can generate one with Python in 5 minutes. There’s a whole lot of flexibility right here.

In fact, privateness is the opposite most evident win. Nothing leaves my community until I push it. The recorder helps end-to-end encryption with a pre-shared key, so even when I sync knowledge between websites, the uncooked coordinates keep protected. No analytics. No third-party servers until I select to make use of them. For the reason that service is pretty light-weight, {hardware} necessities have additionally been modest. You can run this on a spare Raspberry Pi for those who select to. MQTT and the recorder collectively use lower than one % CPU on a five-year-old NAS. The frontend is simply Nginx serving static information. A full 12 months of motion knowledge, logged at ten-second intervals, weighs in at only a few hundred megabytes. That’s a really tiny footprint, all issues thought-about. I’ve additionally layered on extra conveniences for extra peace of thoughts. For instance, the placement knowledge will get backed up nightly not simply to a second NAS, but in addition to — mockingly — Google Drive.

Might a much less technically inclined pal replicate this? Most likely, in the event that they’re snug utilizing Docker Compose and a terminal. OwnTracks is just not plug-and-play, however neighborhood write-ups assist fill within the gaps. There are guides for Synology, Unraid, Raspberry Pi, and plain Linux. And the tooling improves annually. However I’d be kidding if I mentioned it was straightforward. In a great world, we shouldn’t should run a service like this. However with Google’s ham-fisted method towards beloved companies, it’s in all probability for one of the best.

I’m not claiming OwnTracks is ideal. The cell app often stops publishing when Android’s battery supervisor will get too aggressive. The map viewer lacks search. Importing giant datasets can freeze the UI till processing completes. However these are tradeoffs I can reside with. They’re additionally not critical sufficient to impede utilization. All that mentioned, location historical past feels trivial till you lose it. Typically, the one document of a detour or a missed flip that led you to a cool spot is a dot on a map. That dot can jog a reminiscence or just remind you that you simply lined a whole lot of floor that 12 months. Now that dot lives completely on my NAS. If Google brings again Timeline tomorrow, I’d nonetheless keep on with OwnTracks due to that permanence.