I am an information hoarder and liked the Foursquare swarm app for checking into restaurants and other interesting places when I travel, because I love seeing the pins on the map of the places I have been and remembering places later. I have scripts running to download my check-ins and store them in a self hosted map.
But I obviously don’t need to keep giving them my location data. Are there any self hosted alternatives with that kind of international database of places?
If you like to checkin manually to places, there’s PrivateSquare which will query places around you from Foursquare (so, 4sq will still see whereabout you are), but store the actual checkin in a local database.
If you want some automated tracking, I’m mostly happy with OwnTracks which logs to my DaWarIch instance. (I’ve previously used Traccar and php-owntracks-recorder.)
While I don’t see any battery usage from OwnTracks, my only gripe is that it can’t increase the amount of points logged when it detects movement because of Apple iOS limitations.
(For iOS, there’s also Geory which will log into a local database and CAN increase the logging by spawning a Live Activity. It gives me the most accurate logs so far. But they have to be exported manually to be stored elsewhere and the author wants to keep the app simple and doesn’t want to implement logging to external systems.)
Brilliant, love these options. I think Dawarich looks fun, and really powerful data gathering that is mapped to places and summarized, which is very cool