Something I’m missing is a system to track and manage locations and places.
On OsmAnd (Open Street Maps App), I love adding markers and places. I use them to remember places I go to, or places that I regularly get need directions too. I also use a tracking plugin to record certain trips, so I wind up with a tracks file that is saved. I also sync the OsmAnd data directory with Nextcloud for back-up and Nextcloud Maps access.
On Nextcloud Maps, I am able to pull up my tracks for my custom map (OsmAnd). But in the default map, I can see my contacts, photos, and create tracks that I can share online with others (great for group trip planning).
With Owntracks (Andorid), I can share my live location with Nextcloud’s Phone Track, and record my past locations.
The above basically works, but not consistently and well. OsmAnd data is basically inaccessible outside the app. I can’t see my markers and places on a browser. And nothing in the app seems sharable.
Nextcloud Maps can’t mark places, just tracks. And doesn’t really have a useful mobile interface.
Owntracks works about 30-50% of the time, with a lot of timeouts and no data recording. I haven’t debugged whether its the app or the server though. Either way, it doesn’t allow my to see other family member positions through the current NC set-up (HTTP). There seems to be an option with a MQTT server I need to look into.
In short, is there a magical self hosted option where I can:
- Record favorite places
- Record specific trips (higher accuracy, specific timestamp)
- Show and record live locations of multiple users
- Has desktop and mobile UI’s
- Lets me share places and tracks with others
Has anything set-up anything up like this before?
Your frustration is warranted. I consider mapping to be the major unsolved problem in the FOSS universe. It’s certain my one, and I have much more limited aims than you. I just want my personal POIs on a map, in colored categories, with access to that map on desktop and mobile, read and write. I’ve gone with the serverless route, just syncing the two devices, but the Nextcloud method is not so different.
Well, it’s hard. Osmand is amazingly powerful, and apparently has the most advanced POI features of any Android app, but still there are catastrophic flaws. For example, in the GPX it marks up POI categories with its own bespoke GPX markup - totally invisible to desktop software (I had to write a Python script to add it to POIs created on desktop, just so that I can actually see their colors in Osmand). Next, syncing the GPX is made unnecessarily cumbersome by the fact that all the DB files and cached tiles are in the same file tree (I literally use an Android file sync tool to sync the GPX within Android to a place where it can be synced again with my desktop).
What a mess. Pretty sure I haven’t overlooked anything for my simple use case of POIs-on-a-map. It just seems not many people want to do this. Or perhaps they tried and then gave up.
Oh well. This rant is not much use to you, but please accept it as consolation.