Hey, it’s been a minute! Dawarich is your favorite FOSS selfhostable alternative to Google Timeline, remember? We’ve shipped a lot since the last post and I’m here to tell you all about it.
Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich
Website: https://dawarich.app/
First, a picture to get your attention:
Before we start with the great stuff, let me talk a bit about good stuff as well. Release 1.8.0 introduced a new mechanism to let you know about new releases. It works through my new application called Chibichange (https://chibichange.com/).
TL;DR: there is a Chibichange widget shipped in Dawarich, which, if you consent, will ping chibichange.com to check if there are new updates for your Dawarich instance. If there is a new version, a green pulsing dot will be shown in Dawarich navbar, click on it, and you’ll see what’s changed in Dawarich since your current version. Feature suggestion and voting coming to chibichange soon.
Important: this is an opt-in feature, no external requests will be made if you click “No thanks”. If you say “no”, there will be the usual exclamation mark beside the version if there is a new release on Github, but, sadly, no in-app changelogs.
A bit more context: I built Chibichange to have a way to conveniently deliver changelogs to Dawarich users, and soon it’ll also allow you to suggest features, vote them up and provide feedback. Suggested features, if we decide to build them, will be added to our public roadmap. By the way, we recently added a roadmap: https://dawarich.app/roadmap/. Will update it soon with more cool stuff we’ve planned.
Chibichange will be open-sourced this summer and will have same model as Dawarich: FOSS self-hostable software with an optional cloud service for those who don’t want to self-host it. This is a very niche tool, but I hope it will be useful to those in similar position, building self-hostable or otherwise software.
Okay, let’s get back to Dawarich news.
The big one this time: we now draw your flights on the map. If you self-host AirTrail, Dawarich can pull your flight history and render it as proper arcs on Map V2. Set it up on the Integrations page, hit “Sync now”, and it re-syncs daily on its own. Finally your map knows you didn’t teleport across the ocean.
There will be more for flights in the future.
Trips got a full redesign. The whole trip page is now built on MapLibre V2 — a sticky map on the left, and a scrollable day-by-day accordion on the right with per-day distance and times, day-colored routes, a photo overlay toggle, and a replay scrubber to play the trip back. You can also drop a short note on any individual day of a trip now. I’m really happy with how this one came out.
Public sharing is a whole new thing. Trips, tracks, live location and selected time ranges can now be shared via a public, optionally phrase-protected link. Public trip pages look pretty much the same as the in-app ones, with toggles to pick exactly what the page exposes — route, stats, countries, day-by-day, notes, photos, whatever you want.
Here’s a public link to my Norway road trip from the screenshot above: https://my.dawarich.app/s/07024d88-0c43-4554-ad89-d7f2916b7d57
Visit detection got rewritten. There’s a new opt-in stay-point detector — non-ML, single pass, and it gives each suggested visit a 0–100 confidence score. It fixes the old algorithm’s biggest annoyances: missing slow stays, and splitting one visit in two when your phone’s battery died for a bit. It’s behind a flag for now while I gather feedback, but it’ll become the default soon. You can also now label a visit by searching for the real place name right in the Timeline.
What else?
- Multi-device tracks no longer get mangled — if you track from a phone and a watch and a GPS unit, each device stays on its own track instead of becoming one zigzagging mess.
- Fog of War can now reveal per-hexagon, not just per-point.
- Globe view is now on by default.
- Big import improvements: GPX files now stream instead of loading entirely into memory (no more OOM on huge exports), Garmin FIT files are supported, Google’s “Timeline Edits.json” Takeout is recognized, and the official Traccar client is now supported directly.
- Fixed Immich photo timestamps that could be off by up to 24 hours, monthly stats now bucket by your local timezone, and a pile of timezone/DST crashes are gone.
- You can now run the containers as a custom user via PUID/PGID, OIDC fixes (trailing slash + PKCE), and a 2FA lockout to keep accounts safe.
- And, as always, literally a TON of other fixes. Bugs too, sorry, one can’t go without the other.
Gentle reminder: Map V1 (Leaflet) is being sunsetted this August. Everything new is being written for V2, and it’s better in basically every way — but if there’s something from V1 you’d miss, tell me and I’ll figure it out. Vector maps are the future!
Also, a glimpse into the future, I found an awesome tool to generate maps, bent it in couple places to work with Dawarich, and poster generation will be a thing soon!
I was so excited about how well it worked out, that I even researched if it’d be possible to plug an “Order” button into Dawarich, and, well, yes. Probably not gonna automate it right away, will just add the “Order” button beside the “Download” one for created posters, and will see how it goes. Anyway, it could be a good to support the development for anyone willing to do so, while getting a very nice personalized thingy you can actually hang on your wall. Man I love these posters.
We’ve finally released an update for our mobile apps, with the new logo, bug fixes and a registration flow that will have no use to selfhosters, but still is important thing to have. Annoying bug with the map not being rendered in dark mode is fixed, yay. Also, we had to re-list our Android app in Google Play Store, so the update will require you to download it separately and reauthenticate. Make sure you’ve uploaded all the data you had not yet uploaded in the old app. New app’s page: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.dawarich.Dawarich
We’ll still release a small update for the old one with a banner suggesting an update. Sorry for this inconvenience.
This mobile release took a lot of efforts and tons of testing, but it opens new possibilities for us, and in the next one we want to focus on battery consumption optimization and, finally, will start making more steps towards feature parity with the web app.
I guess that would be it for today! I actually wanted to write a post every month, but, well, it’s also too good to post one every other month :)
Saving you a scroll:
Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich
Website: https://dawarich.app/
iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dawarich/id6739544999
Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.dawarich.Dawarich
Donate: https://www.patreon.com/freika / https://github.com/sponsors/Freika/
P.S. I got my shit together and started tinkering on another app, which, once done and production ready, will open lots of new possibilities for Dawarich, check it out: https://atlas.dawarich.app/. It’s basically self-hostable offline maps for homelabbers, built on shoulders of titans: Overpass, Photon, Valhalla and some other great mapping tools, under a single UI and API. I’ll create a separate post here once it’s mature enough. Map matching comes to Dawarich, baby!
P.P.S If you’re in Berlin, I’ll be doing a presentation on Dawarich on Geomob, a mapping meetup, 1st of October. Come say hi, I may have stickers for you by then!
Nice!
What are your use cases for an app like this? Not trying to hate or anything - I just never used timeline and don’t really get what it is doing for you?
Looks very cool in any case!
I’ve used it for when I remember a cool place I’ve been, but can’t pinpoint the exact location, like a campsite or something. It’s the type of thing that I rarely use, but when I need it, it’s invaluable.
Does the update allow viewing tracks/routes for family member devices?
The workaround I’ve employed is simply logging into my wife’s account and her logging into mine to see detailed info, but if we had kids or more family members then it would be nice to get full tracks/routes and not only live location.
I set this up a week or two ago and have been quite pleased besides this hiccup. Thanks for all of your hard work!
(Also, for anyone curious I do like Colota on Android for the device tracking portion to accompany Dawarich.)
Does the new Dawarich mobile app show family member location now? Do you have plans for that? Visiting a web page on mobile isn’t ideal :)
Not yet: family will come to mobile apps in one of the future releases.
I have a feeling I answered this specific question multiple times in the recent days, was it you who asked it? :)
The Family feature is free for self-hosters and will be added as a separate subscription plan to the cloud this summer
It sounds like the app requires some manual intervention to start/stop tracking, is there a way to make it work like google location history where it’s always fully automatic and in the background without extra battery drain?
Some of the other apps I’ve tried before for my traccar instance had a lot of battery drain or would randomly stop working in the background, I don’t remember which ones I tried as it was awhile ago.
I just don’t stop tracking 24/7 on my iPhone. Some users configure Automations to start tracking when they leave their home and stop when they are back. My battery drain was 5% in the last 24 hours, and if it’s too much, Dawarich supports half dozen 3rd party mobile apps to track geodata (including Traccar), you can try them all :)
Berlin? Yes, I know it well. I stabbed a woman in a bar in Berlin. I also sexually assaulted a horse in Berlin! ~ Eurotrip
Jokes aside, man that looks sharp! What’s the lore behind this? What was your motivation?
Love the Eurotrip movie!
Well, Google killed their Timeline and I just dove into selfhosting at the moment, so I used OwnTracks for 6 months and decided it’s not enough :) That’s how Dawarich was born
First time I’m hearing about this. Looks very neat. I really only have Google Maps for the timeline so I will have to selfhost this and try this out soon.
Hope it will work well for you!
For the curious people like me: AirTrail
Thanks! Should’ve linked it in the post :)
Looks great!
Small question, is it possible to log a specific journey? For example in Denmark you are required to keep a precise log of your driving if you want to get a tax rebate, so if you could log a specific journey and save it for later for tax documentation, that would be great.
Nothing stops you from recording 24/7 or only during a period when you toggled tracking on :) I’m also using Dawarich for tax purposes
I was more thinking of being able to “mark” part of the 24/7 recording as a drive to work so it could be found and aggregated later.
You know, it’s free to self host, so I’ll just experiment and see how it works :)
Ah, of course! The Trips feature is what you’re looking for. Example: I track 24/7, and then go to the Trips page, hit “Create Trip” and set datetimes for the beginning and the end of the trip. Dawarich calculates and shows route on the map, and when you save the trip, time, distance and visited countries are being calculated. Check the example:
Can I integrate location history from google maps or my running watch or just my phone? Would be interested just in getting that print out of all my runs
Also—why would someone want location history beyond getting that cool map? What does this add that my selfhosted ability to remember where I went doesn’t?
You can import Google Timeline data, extracted via Takeout or from your phone, GPX, GeoJSON, .rec (OwnTracks’ format), KML and KMZ, so if you have some existing data, we got you covered. On iOS, there is also an option to import GPX tracks from your Apple Health, but this is a paid feature for self-hosters. It’s available for free for our cloud subscribers though.
As for the whys: It’s good to have a way to see where you’ve been at some point in time or when you visited a certain place. It’s also useful for reimbursement purposes, for example I use it to see how many days I worked from home and how many days I went to fork from the office, so I could properly file my tax report and get tax reimbursement. Or to get reimbursement from my employer for a business trip
how many days I went to fork from the office
you’re certified?
For tax reports? Nope, but for German tax offices it’s enough to provide estimation
They were making a joke (from your work/fork typo) based off a previous post here this week about forklift certification. “Fork certified” is where they were going.
I’m feeling stupid :D Thanks! Won’t even fix the typo, this is hilarious
Don’t feel bad. It is impossible to see every post and it wasn’t even in this sub. It was in the dull_mens_club com. The post was fun though.
Edit: Said post is here: https://lemmy.world/post/48517371
