Hi there, everyone.
For various reasons, our family makes use of Life360. I’m wanting to move to either a linux or completely degoogled phone(ATM, I’m on Graphene but utilize the Play store for Life360 and a few other apps) but can’t afford not to have the ability for a group of 4 phones to share their locations with each other all the time, not just to send a pin at certain times. I ONLY need the real time sharing to other devices in the group, I don’t need anything else that Life360 offers.
It can’t be hard to use as one of the phones we need it on is owned by an 80yo with cognitive/memory issues. This is where Life360 shines, we’re able to find him without him ever needing to do anything on his phone.
Is there an option for this out there for self hosting? I could even handle not self-hosted but multi-OS and non-Play connected. I do have a couple VPS I could run backend software on, if needed.
Thanks for your time!
I use Home Assistant for this. It works very well and the data is all local. It’s probably a bit heavy if you don’t use the other parts of home assistant though.
After several projects this is the best solution by my lights. The home assistant companion app coupled with tasker is pretty powerful. You can call remote location updates via intents and use taskerHA plugin for back and forth communication between the two.
Do you know if it works well with GrapheneOS?
Does it use http or MQTT?
I was using Traccar and that worked well until moving to GOS and then background updates wouldn’t work.
I tried owntrack and nextcloud but never got it to work.
It uses http, and yes, it works perfectly on GrapheneOS.
Home Assistant location doesn’t quite play nice with GOS. My wife and I have been looking for a Life360 replacement ourselves. She runs Graphene, and it’ll grab location periodically, but it’s not consistent.
Do you use persistent connection? Both myself and my partner use GOS and it works fine, and updates frequently. You might also be able to change the pull rate as well.
I want to say I enabled it, but I’ll have to check again.
Does increasing the poll rate affect the battery usage much?
I think it could drain battery depending on what settings you tweak. However, I don’t have terrible battery drain. Here’s all of my settings that could be related:
With those settings, I get pretty frequent updates to my location. I do wonder about the call out that the update interval for locations is separate from others, I wonder if that applies?
So we took a look trying to figure out why her phone wasn’t giving HA a consistent location… She likes to turn off the camera/mic/location killswitches 😂
Quick fix haha, but at least we know that Graphene is doing the thing that it’s known to do!
Interesting. Thanks for the screenshots, I’ll have my wife check those settings.
Dawarich is good!
Do you know if it works well with GrapheneOS?
I was using Traccar and that worked well until moving to GOS and then background updates wouldn’t work.
I tried owntrack and nextcloud but never got it to work.
Yea GOS+Owntracks is great!
I have been using Hauk for ages. Not the most advanced or modern, but works like a charm! https://github.com/bilde2910/Hauk
Do you know if it works well with GrapheneOS?
Does it use http or MQTT?
I was using Traccar and that worked well until moving to GOS and then background updates wouldn’t work.
I tried owntrack and nextcloud but never got it to work.
No idea what it uses but I used on GrapheneOS without issues.
Really appreciate your feedback. I’ll try it! Never heard of it before.
Been using it for years on grapheneos. Runs afaik via https only, super lightweight clientside
We just use home Assistant. It works great.
Trackar is also a very good and lightweight option.
Just wanted to mention it.
I use paralino on grapheneOS. I have been using it for a year or so. You can have groups like family or friends and create locations so you can get alerts when someone leaves or arrives. There is a subscription fee but it isn’t a lot and only one person needs to buy it. Everything is end to end encrypted and only exists between the devices. There isn’t a central server storing your data. I would rather self host something but at the time I wasn’t prepared to do it and now it just works for me.
This is an absolute gem and I thank you very much for the suggestion. I’m in the same boat as you and will happily pay them until I decide to handle the backend myself.
I’m using reitti, which I believe allows real time location sharing, if you enable it. I’m using the Overland app on iPhone, I think it was the same app on android but I don’t have that phone in front of me at the moment (iPhone is for work).
I literally set this up yesterday. I already have Nextcloud, so I installed the PhoneTrack app for that. PhoneTrack app on my Android, and Traccar on my wife’s iPhone. For her to view locations, she has to log in to Nextcloud in a browser. I bookmarked it and pinned it to her home screen.
Only one I’m aware of is OwnTracks via HomeAssistant
On the other hand, Zood Location is p2p and e2ee.
HA has it built in, you don’t need to use any integration other than the built in mobile app integration.
I recommend the Colota app for tracking. I use a mix of Reitti and Dawarich at the moment to log the info (both of which support sharing) as I can’t work out which I prefer.
my wife and i use owntracks for address now. it’s a pretty easy setup, bit can be expended at will. the confusing part at the beginning is just that there is no actual “owntracks server”.
what you do is: set up a mqtt server, of you don’t have one already (e.g. mosquitto) and install the owntracks app on the devices.
Phonetrack for nextcloud. https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/phonetrack
I just saw a new version of GeoPulse announced here https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1ukljop/geopulse_selfhosted_alternative_to_google/
Seems a bit like overkill given the “can’t be hard to use” requirement, but thought I’d share in case it’s useful anyway :)
This is the usecase I still use WhatsApp for, since it has location sharing without Play services and works on GrapheneOS.
phonetrack for nextcloud
To add to the collection of chat apps enabling that, there is XMPP, too: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.monocles.chat/
