I like the fact that my Android phone records my location timeline from Google Maps, but the fact that this is stored in Google servers creeps me out.
I know you can download the entire location history database from Google so I was planning on building a custom app to store and browse this data.
I was also curious if there would be the possibility of making the phone send locations to this app instead of Google, but I don’t know much about Android and I don’t know if this would be possible.
What do you think about it? Is there already an app like this? Do you think this is a good idea?
Nextcloud has a few options for something like this. PhoneTrack I think the app is called. You install the app on the phone and then connect it with a nextcloud server with the PhoneTrack app installed and setup. Then it would send all that information to your nextcloud instance. I don’t know if you can stop the traffic to googles servers though.
Well, if this app works Instead of Google maps for sending the location you can then disable location collection in Google
I use gpslogger with it. It works perfectly fine
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.mendhak.gpslogger/
I use phonetrack, works very well and haven’t noticed any battery drain from it at all or it cutting out or anything like that. You can also configure how often it updates GPS/location on the server, can detect type of movement to increase/decrease polling and things like that. On the Nextcloud side I can share a map with my location and it updates a lot faster than Google does. Doesn’t look as polished but it works well.