Because of various privacy legislation, and people not wanting Google to track them as much, they stopped syncing the data to Google servers. As someone who's worked at big tech companies, my guess would be that storing so many people's location history was flagged as an issue during a privacy audit.

It's entirely local now. You can enable encrypted backups and back up the data, however you can really only have the data on one device now, and the web version is gone.

I tried setting up own tracks like a year ago and it sucked HARD.

Has the computer setup potion become any easier?

The device only was for privacy. When the data was stored in the cloud, the government had unrestricted access. By making it device only they need to get your device to get that data.

What else could that possibly mean?

It never went away. It's still a feature. It's just stored locally on your device. Thats it.

Lol. The only thing this setting does is hide the information from the user. Google, or a thousand other data brokers (many probably created by Google for this purpose) still retain that data indefinitely.

Yes, technically it's still on the tiny screen of your phone with a really bad ux to make it go, sure. But you see how 'went away' is both true for web and effectively true for phone app? You do see that, right?

But not exactly how the app works. If it's a Strava-like app you have to remember to run in the foreground, the value is a lot lower to me than something that either uses or replicates GPS' automatic background behaviour.

the official app tries to not be killed by Android woth the usual tricks (permanent notification, disabling battery optimisation)

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You can (theoretically) control how often locations are tracked and sent but for me was using the location service constantly and draining battery quite a bit.

Ah. Those are exactly what I was worried about. It's not able to just happen entirely in the background the same way Google's feature does, then? Kind of automagically?

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.