Hello there, good people of lemmy world! It was my mistake to never post Dawarich updates here before and I’m here to fix it! I hope you’ll find it interesting and useful.
In case you don’t know what Dawarich is, it’s your favorite free open-source self-hostable alternative to Google Timeline and your memory’s best friend.
Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich
Website: https://dawarich.app/
Oh well, what a journey. It all started as a simple CRUD app with an endpoint to accept data from the Owntracks app for iOS. The first versions didn’t even have authentication! Why bother, thought I, if I’m the only user. And look at us now.
What do we have now
So, let’s have a look at our current set of features, shall we?
As of today, we have:
- Location tracking
- Via Dawarich for iOS and Android (yeah we have the Android app now!)
- Via GPSLogger, Overland, OwnTracks, Homeassistant, PhoneTrack, Colota and whatnot
- Location visualization
- On a flat surface or on a globe
- As points, routes, heatmap, fog of war
- As extra layers, such as scratch map
- Visits, areas and places
- Can be created manually or detected and suggested automatically
- Tags for places, including privacy settings (hide my location history in X meters around a place that have a tag with privacy settings assigned)
- Family
- With full privacy and location sharing only on consent
- Map tools
- Places, visits and areas creation
- Area selection tool (to show visits and manage points in selected area)
- Transportation modes
- Replay tool (oh I love it, gonna tell a bit more about it below)
- Map search: enter place name or address to see when you visited it
- Trips
- Utilizing photos integration to show photos along the trip route
- Stats
- Total distance, points, countries and cities
- Per-year and per-month distance traveled charts
- Insights
- Per-year distance traveled
- Traveling heatmap
- Countries and cities visited
- Days traveled
- Year-to-year comparison
- Monthly insights
- Activity breakdown (stationary vs driving vs walking etc.)
- Top visited locations
- “When do you travel” patterns
- Imports and exports
- Almost a dozen of supported file formats to import
- Export to GPX, GeoJSON and full user account export
Huh, that’s pretty much it, right? I mean, what a progress. All thanks to you and your support guys.
The Android app release
At the beginning of this year we’ve finally released our own Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zeitflow.dawarich
It’s, of course, still rough around the edges, but I see it as a huge win and an opportunity to do more exciting stuff on the mobiles. The main focus, of course, is the tracking quality, and I think with the most recent release we got there and it works pretty stable now, but what do I know, I only yesterday ordered an android phone for internal tests! :D But seriously, please do share your feedback, it’s crucial for the quality of our apps. Once again — thank you.
By the way, we also have an unofficial android app built by sunstep, a member of Dawarich community: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sunstep.dawarich. Check it out as well, he put tremendous amount of work into it. The mobile shift
We’re working on moving the iOS app to the same codebase, as the Android one, so they would effectively share the same UI layer, while keeping native location tracking mechanisms for both platform under the hood. This means that the iOS app will rather soon be updated and both apps will have a green light to receive new features.
This is important, because we want our apps to able to do more. Dawarich started with the idea to bring convenience of the big screen back when Google killed the web-based Timeline, but hey, it’s 2026 and people are running around with phones in their pockets for what, 15 years now? Or more, I didn’t check that, but the idea is that web is awesome, but it’s also very convenient to be able to quickly check your data on your smaller screen while commuting or otherwise not having access to the bigger screen. That’s why we want to bring more viewing functionality to our apps. Trips, stats, insights (they are already there in the Android app by the way) and more.
And, just to make it clear: all 3rd party mobile clients currently supported will be also supported in the future. We have no plans enforcing our users to switch to our official apps. The choice belongs to you. The Replay
Remember I mentioned a replay tool in the feature list? Well, check this out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XiG5Kcevr4
sounds of excitement
I initially called it “Timeline” but the actual Timeline was introduced a few days later, so I renamed it to what it is — the Replay button. Love it.
Supporters Badge
More than a hundred people (I think the number is now closer to two hundreds) supported and keep supporting us financially during these two years, and as a small token of appreciation, we’d like to offer a nice shiny Supported Badge that will be shown in your Dawarich UI, see the screenshot.
It’s an optional thing, that can be enabled in Settings -> General -> Supporter Status form. Just enter the email you used to sign in on a platform you supported us through (GitHub Sponsors / Ko-Fi / Patreon), and if it’s in our supporters list, you’ll receive this nice shiny badge. It can be disabled though, in case you don’t like it. No pressure.
The webhooks from GitHub are currently a bit broken, so if you donated via Github Sponsors and verification didn’t work for you, feel free to reach me directly and I’ll add you to the supporters list manually.
What’s next
We already have some new features in progress, so more good stuff is coming. One particular thing I’m super excited about, but I’ll keep it a secret for now. Just wanted to heat up the excitement a bit :D
Aside from the plans for mobile, I’m working on improvements for trips, visits & places (which are begging for an UI/UX rework) and some stuff will be introduced in order to reduce the database sizes of your self-hosted instances. Keep an eye on the releases, it’s all there.
You, the people
Once again, I want to say thank you to all of you: for reading my posts, for installing Dawarich and trying it out, for providing feedback, for creating issues with thorough bug reports on GitHub, for testing our Android app during the beta period, for being part of our Discord community. Thank you to all of our contributors: we have a few PRs with meaningful contributions opened and some already merged, one of them reduced time of our docker images build from ~70 mins to roughly 25 mins. We have a lot of low-hanging fruits waiting to be fixed in our code, simply because I don’t always have time to address all the known issues. Don’t hesitate to dive in and open a PR if you feel like you can improve something in Dawarich.
To save you a scroll, as always, the links one more time:
Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich
Website: https://dawarich.app/
The work continues, and there will be more, better and faster.
~ Evgenii from Dawarich—
Wait, just two weeks ago I was looking for a new GPS logging app and didn’t notice that there’s now an official (and non-official) dedicated Android app available. I’ll have to try it out.
I’ve been using Dawarich for a while now and the biggest problem was always finding a way to get a good app that can do both accurate, and battery-saving tracking.
Anyway, love the project and seeing it continually improving.
Thank you!
Sooo, all my photos live in immich…This could manage tracks from hikes and stuff.
Is there any way to combine those two powers, like displaying immich pictures in davarich?
https://github.com/dedicatedcode/reitti
I currently use Reitti and it has immich integration
Yup, we have integrations for both Immich and Photoprism, and you can totally show your photos on the map once integrated
Are there any plans to make the android app available on F-Droid as well? Or releasing the apk in the GitHub repo so we can install it with Obtainium?
Sorry if this has already been mentioned somewhere, couldn’t find it in your post or on the website.
F-Droid is possible but we’re currently using google services for location tracking, so it’s not possible to publish there due to that. And we also have a LOT of work ahead of us, so it’s not a priority
Thanks for taking the time to reply.
In the meantime I tried the app and it looks awesome! However, I noticed the app relies on google’s services location accuracy unfortunately. This is kind of a deal breaker for me to use the app for now. But I get that imlementing an F-Droid version is not your top priority, so I’ll follow the project and patiently wait for it :)
Iset it up a long while ago but haven’t updated in a long while either… not sure whether the tracking is still active on my phone. Thanks for this post, I’ll see whether there is an easy upgrade path to 1.0 without too many breaking changes 😄
There were a few breaking changes around v0.17 I think, but it’s been pretty smooth since then.
I’ve had this starred for a while, but I think I’ll set this up soon. It’s looking pretty good.
I’ve got it on my server for a while now. I love it. Thank you!
I’d love to donate. Publishing an IBAN would be great for all europeans because there are no transaction fees.
The android app is a killer feature!!!
A real gap is location sharing for signal and matrix. And that people can request a location.
We have multiple ways for donations and we don’t really care about fees right now :) Any support appreciated!
OK, I didn’t read the full text but I saw self-hostable alternative to Google Timeline and Hona Assistant and I’m sold!
Google timeline once genuenly helped me get my Swedish citizenship, but it also freaked me out how much data Google had about me.
I had to write down when I left the country and when I came back for the last 5 years or so, and without timeline it would not been possible because during that time I traveled abroad at least twice a Mont for a year.
Anyway it sounds very cool especially because I’m already having Home assistant set up for this but it doesn’t have this timeline functionality.
Before building Dawarich, I naturally extracted my data via Google Takeout and my mind was blown same as yours when I realized just HOW MUCH they know about me even when we’re talking location only. It was a big incentive for me to take control over my data, or, at least, to ALSO have it, same as many-many cloud provides and apps have.
For home assistant integration, you can start here: https://dawarich.app/docs/getting-started/track-your-location#home-assistant
Does it have an “explored map” feature? I’ve seen apps that will track how much of a city you’ve explored, and uncover or highlight those parts.
To a degree, yes! Check this out:
This is Fog of War mode, removing the Fog of War (as you guessed) from places you visited or drove through.
The percentage of how much of a city or a country was discovered is something I want to implement at some point in the future
Neat! I’ll have to set it up and give it a spin.
Does it detect travel method? So like if I travel by train, car or on foot?
I didn’t read everything because the feature list is not formatted correctly to make it easy to read/scan.
I tried so hard to fix the formatting… :D
Yes, it tries to infer transportation mode based on speed and accelleration (https://github.com/Freika/dawarich/blob/dev/app/services/transportation_modes/mode_classifier.rb#L16-L43). I can’t claim it’s perfect, but user can adjust values for these in the map settings, and based on how it behaves in real world, I may introduce further adjustments to the default settings
That’s great because that’s what I miss from using Google Maps. I like to see how far I’ve travelled by train each month for example.
