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!
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.
If not hosting anything is ok for you, deltachat allows you to share locations to people in a chat. It’s fully e2ee. You can use it with existing relays, but if you want you can host one that will be useful to everyone: https://chatmail.at/
Dev of reitti here 👋
Reitti allows sharing data like live location between users. If you use the owntracks app, you would even see all users, which share their location woth you, directly in the app.
Else you can see them in reitti directly with their latest known location.
I’ve been following reitti for some time. Happily surprised to see you on Lemmy :)
Didn’t knew it allowed live location sharing, thanks for the info.
I try to be active on both. Reddit has the reach, but I like the vibe of this community on Lemmy. It is so much calmer and friendlier.
Over the last year, the community came up with some awesome ideas I incorporated into Reitti. It is easy to miss some of them. I try to add as much documentation as possible, but it is, on one side, hard to anticipate how users search for features and, on the other, not to miss some of them over time. Maybe it is a good idea to take some time and add all missing stuff since I am wrapping up the 5.0 release.
If I remember correctly, data sharing came as a suggestion on my first post here on Lemmy. Over the last year, I refined that, and now users on the same instance can share their data. You are even able to connect to users on other instances of Reitti and finally share your data via magic links.
I am really thankful for all the support Reitti gets, and the ideas of our users make a difference in how it is coming along.
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.
I am using the OwnTracks app on Graphene OS via http and it’s working well so far, but I only set it up very recently.
I installed with obtanium and it doesn’t need any play services, Graphene’s location service works fine.
I am using a different back end though, GeoPulse not Reitti. Still evaluating the different choices, I will probably try Reitti as well.
You can get data via HTTP into reitti. Registering reitti on a MQTT broker also works.
I’m trying this out right now. I’ve been using dawarch but it still has some ironing out to do.
FYI, the wget command pulled the github web page HTML where the file is hosted instead of the file itself. Weird. Easy fix but I’m guessing that’s a GitHub issue.
Thank you for the info. I will check the command.
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.
Does it use http or MQTT?
Home Assistant uses HTTP for this. Realistically, you won’t see much difference between HTTP and MQTT for this use case.
MQTT is harder to secure than HTTP, and has some limitations (eg it normally only supports username and password auth - no SSO, no 2FA) so I’d avoid it for anything public-facing unless you have a specific reason to use it. Using it via a VPN is fine, but you’d still need to configure a separate MQTT username and password per user.
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Home Assistant isn’t FOSS? How?
Sorry, misworded that, I meant it isn’t as good as a dedicated self hosted FOSS tracking service. meaning HA has access to my location data but i’ve also put lots of third party addons and integrations into HA that have to be trusted with access to that information too.
A dedicated service would be a bit easier for peace of mind as it would be isolated.
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.
I use Traccar, at least on Android the tracker is set and forget, and the web app can be installed as a PWA for easy viewing of all devices. Admin interface is a little clunky, but when you get it set up it works great.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Git Popular version control system, primarily for code MQTT Message Queue Telemetry Transport point-to-point networking NAS Network-Attached Storage SSO Single Sign-On VPN Virtual Private Network
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.
[Thread #15 for this comm, first seen 16th Jun 2026, 00:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
ElementX (main mobile matrix client) has live location sharing that works in group chats. Be aware that any location sharing system that loads map data (tiles) from a server automatically leaks your location to that server. The only way to solve this would be to have all the map tiles required stored offline but I’m not aware of any solution that does this. The simplest way to achieve maximum privacy is to just have something that automatically shares just the coordinates as a text message at a regular interval then you can open those coordinates in an offline map app.
As you can see here, the map tiles are loaded from “MapLibre” when using ElementX or rather its cool fork SchildiChatNext. That means MapLibre would technically know roughly where you are and have been. All apps that dont prompt you to download large chunks of map data in advance will load map tiles on demand and expose your location.
Dawarich and Reitti are the two I know of. tested both around a year ago, but not used really since then
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.
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 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.
Phonetrack for nextcloud. https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/phonetrack
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.
