Hi there, my dear people of Selfhosted!
Evgenii here, the developer of Dawarich, a free, open-source, self-hostable alternative to Google Timeline.
Eight releases since my last update, and we’re now at 1.15.3. Some fun map things, some integrations with other self-hosted apps, and a lot of work on the rough edges you brought up in the comments. Thank you for those, by the way :)
AI Disclosure (as per lemmy.world/post/49320548):
Implementation - Generated
Testing - Generated
Design - Generated
Our links:
Github: github.com/Freika/dawarich
Website: dawarich.app
iOS app: apps.apple.com/us/app/dawarich/id6739544999
Android app: play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.dawaric…
Your location history now comes with exploration achievements
Every country gets a collectible card, and 183 countries have a grid of their first-level regions. Spend enough time in a region and it becomes part of your collection. The threshold follows your minimum-time-in-city setting, so simply passing through wouldn’t count as exploring it.
Existing history is checked in the background, and earned regions stay earned. You can share a card through a link with a preview of its geography and progress.
This shipped experimentally in 1.15.2 and is available without a feature flag in 1.15.3. A little geography game built from the places you’ve actually been. I think this is a pretty lovely use for location history :)
I have some plans for the achievements system, so this is just the beginning. For example, I’d love to add the US national parks, Camino de Santiago, lighthouses visits and probably some other spacial achievements that can fit nicely. Let me know if you have have ideas for the feature!
Update to points editing on the map
In the last post, I said you’d have to turn tiled rendering off to drag points around. That restriction is gone.
You can drag a point directly on the vector-tile map, and its track and segments are recalculated. There’s undo and redo for the last five moves (which I love a lot), and edits sync to other open sessions. On touch screens, a long press starts the drag.
The main map now uses vector tiles by default, so there’s no beta toggle to remember. We’ve also fixed date-range clipping: selecting Today should show the relevant part of a track, even if the track itself spans a longer period.
Some of those GPS spikes got attention
Several people mentioned weird jumps and tracks zigzagging between devices.
A stray location uploaded on its own is now checked again when the next point arrives, which catches anomalies the original upload couldn’t reveal. Family maps also filter anomaly points.
Trips recorded by several devices at once now use the busiest device during overlapping recording periods. Devices used one after another still stay in the trip. For an existing trip with a messy route or wrong distance, press Recalculate on its page.
These are specific fixes; tracking and transportation-mode detection still have edge cases. Reports with the tracker, server version and an example remain very helpful.
More of your self-hosted apps can talk to Dawarich
- TREK: import planned trips, put the itinerary over your recorded route, and bring over day notes. Imported notes keep syncing until you edit them in Dawarich.
- TeslaMateApi: sync completed drives into your location history, manually or daily.
- OsmAnd and other GPX waypoint exports: import favourites as places, with categories becoming tags. Re-imports don’t duplicate them, and bookmarks don’t affect your distance statistics.
You can also share a trip privately with family members. It appears in their trip list with a read-only map, respecting sharing settings and privacy zones.
Experimental MCP support
Dawarich has a read-only MCP endpoint now. A compatible assistant can read a timeline of up to seven days, find your latest recorded location, and search your visits by place, city, country or area name. It’s available to every self-hosted user. The MCP tools cannot edit or delete data. If your client uses a cloud AI provider, the location data it requests goes to that provider, so your choice of client matters. I know some Dawarich users integrate with their Hermes assistant, so that may come in handy :)
Setup and privacy details: dawarich.app/docs/features/mcp/
A few smaller things you’ll probably notice
Video Studio has a Fog of War mode and exact start/end time selection. Poster and video generation now load the route correctly when using tiled rendering.
Immich and PhotoPrism photo handling got fixes around timestamps, missing photos and archived images. City statistics now handle infrequent location reports better, and Simplified Chinese brings the interface to seven languages.
Geocoding configuration now lives under Settings → Instance, with a connection test and no redeploy needed. Environment variables still take precedence. There’s also a Send test email button under General settings.
An upgrade note worth reading
Version 1.14.5 fixed a registration bypass affecting self-hosted versions 1.7.1–1.14.4: the mobile registration endpoint could create an account even when registration was disabled. If you’re running an affected version, upgrade to a patched release. For an internet-facing instance, also check Settings → Users for unexpected accounts. Security advisory.
Mobile apps update
We also updated mobile apps, and those are no small changes, thanks to my partner, Konstantin.
First of all, let me take a step back and provide you some broader context. It may be something new to our Android users, but on iOS we do have an optional subscription for self-hosters (all mentioned features are available for free with no extra payment to our cloud users), who want to support development. After subscribing user could easily import their GPX tracks from Apple Health (see screenshot below). I’m stressing the word “optional”, because no data is being paywalled, the tracks from Apple Health can be extracted for free in other way, just less convenient, and imported to Dawarich without any limits.
Now, we added two more features to this subscription on iOS: rich widgets and importing geodata from Apple Photos to Dawarich. Mind you, there is a simpler daily widget that is available without this subscription. Again, see the screenshot below:
Now, to Android. For the first time, it received the same subscription, except there is currently no way to easily import GPX tracks from Google Health Connect to Dawarich, so the subscription only provides two features: widgets and importing geodata from your photos. We wanted to add the third feature to Android as well, but this time Google did not allow us to release the app with it built in, referencing to the required permissions not being crucual for the app functionality. I hope we can add it eventually to Android as well. Important: core functionality of our mobile apps is and will remain free, nothing that is already free will ever be hidden behind a paywall. We’re seeing it as a way for our users to support development and get something nice and optional in return. I hope you can trust me on this, and if not — I’m happy to answer any of your questions.
Now, about the new features in mobile apps!
Family is here!
Finally, you can see and manage your family location sharing settings. Family members are now visible on the map as well as their location history (given they have it enabled, privacy-first, you know). Proper family management will be added later, but I think it’s a great first step.
Settings sync
Your Dawarich instance now will serve as a sync point so you could have same tracking settings on your new device as on the old one. Neat.
Widgets
As mentioned and shown above, Daily widget available to all Dawarich app users free or charge, and if you would like to have the Insights one, you can support the development with a coin :) If you’d rather not, I won’t judge you.
Importing geodata from photos on your device
Basically, what the subheader says. Again, if you’d rather not pay, we got you covered: there is a free private (nothing leaves your device) tool to extract geodata from your photos: dawarich.app/tools/photo-geotagging/
Visits sync
At last, after few months, we’re releasing visits sync for iOS. You see, the iOS itself detects places you visited and Dawarich for iOS had them for ages, but there was no way to send them to your Dawarich server, until the recent update. Now visits are being synced and I already had a very positive feedback on the quality of iOS visit detection. The Android OS unfortunately doesn’t have such thing, but we’ll probably figure something out for our app ourselves. Oh, and the Android app doesn’t munch on your phone battery like a monster anymore.
And as always, our links one more time to save you a scroll:
Github: github.com/Freika/dawarich
Website: dawarich.app
iOS app: apps.apple.com/us/app/dawarich/id6739544999
Android app: play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.dawaric…
Donate: www.patreon.com/freika / github.com/sponsors/Freika/
P.S. I hope you like stickers, coz we have stickers now! Leave your address in the form: tally.so/r/1A1DBg
The idea is to leave them during our travels and then compose a map with stickers positions on it, so please do send me photos of places you applied a sticker with coordinates :) The address is hi@dawarich.app
P.P.S. Kudos to you for scrolling all way down here! I’m experimenting with something extra radical and it could make all our self-hosters dreams come true: smaller CPU and RAM impact, less containers, better performance and what not… join our Discord and check offtop channel if I got you hooked :) discord.gg/pHsBjpt5J8 See ya!
dfyx@piefed.social 8 hours ago
So what is your contribution to that whole project? Clearly not the idea because that was Google.