Yeah, super hard to find...

I tried both the OwnTracks server and Dawarich, and had problems using them with my reverse proxy (Caddy), which I didn't manage to fix. Eventually, I installed the Nextcloud app Phonetrack, and I've been using it for months with the OwnTracks client: it works fine, it can also export GPX files, which I can use to tag pictures shot with my camera, using Darktable. I recommend this solution if you are already using Nextcloud!

Privacy? I'm sure that Google tried so hard to monetize it and after so many years they didn't found a way, couldn't use it for ai training too, so they decided to turn it off and save millions in database costs.

They still exfiltrate user movements for improving Google maps, it's just that they don't need to keep them indefinitely or for years or maintain a nice interface for that

Yes, that's correct, Google didn't do it out of the goodness of their non-existent heart, they made what they think is the best financial decision.

It's a good one for the consumer though, whether see that or not. It's good that your every move ever taken is stored in a company's database.

Don't worry, they most certainly used it to train a decent model of any typical American demographics movements before scrubbing it.

I'm sure Google does monetize the gps data instantly, then throws it away rather than save old data that only costs money to respond to government requests.

This is a case where privacy is economically beneficial to Google.

Mmmh, I don't think the app ever got disabled by Android during my days of testing (I actually reinstalled yesterday and having a look again, battery drain seems a bit better now so far ... ). But obviously a system service is always gonna be prioritised higher than a user app. But as I said I didn't have this problem with this app (actually the only one I can think of is Syncthing and with that I'm not sure if it's not the app going to a sleep mode or something by itself).

What problems did you encounter? I dimly not using the official docker-compose file but one from else (because I wanted to use Http?) but personally I didn't find it as complicated as setting up Immich or Invoice Ninja or other services that have multiple containers that need to talk to each other.

It requires drill down now and doesn't list visits on the location itself which is a huge negative.

Google also accidentally deleted a random amount of user's timeline data if you didn't immediately catch it and restore from back up last March before the affected backups were overwritten. If you didn't keep a close enough watch on your timeline to know that that happened, everything before ~Feb 2025 is gone now.

Ask me how I know. Yes I kept up on permissions. Yes I had backups on. No I didn't have a new device. I even have dozens of available gigabytes of paid storage on Google One.

I'm sure it will only get more stable due to maps and timeline being revenue generators that encourage investment.

Hmm. I’ll have to try it again.

If I run into issues I’ll report back and thanks!

I recorded data since 2013. I loved checking out previous vacation trip locations or just randomly browsing through where I've been. All gone now.

Did everything Google recommended but they just deleted it and there's no way to get it back.

I really wish I would've made an offline backup or something before.

Same, been kicking myself since I found out it was all gone a few weeks ago. Don't know why I didn't make a 'just in case' backup / export.

Still infuriating they can just go "oops all gone". It came through the roll-out fine, I remember looking stuff up in February. As far as I can tell it was a later unrelated glitch.

categorically false. literally do a little bit of research. it is stored on-device entirely now, and Google has no access to it.