Selfhosted@lemmy.worldbySchwim Dandy@piefed.zip
12 days

Any self-hosted option for real time location sharing?

play.google.com English

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!

10
    Life360: Family Safety & GPS - Apps on Google Play
    play.google.com
    All-in-one family safety: location sharing, crash alerts, driver reports & more
    • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzbot accountEnglish
      5 days

      Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

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      XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (‘Jabber’) for open instant messaging

      6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.

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    • AmbiguousProps@lemmy.todayEnglish
      12 days

      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.

      • yestalgia@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12 days

        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.

          • Lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            11 days

            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.

            • AmbiguousProps@lemmy.todayEnglish
              11 days

              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.

              • Lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                11 days

                I want to say I enabled it, but I’ll have to check again.

                Does increasing the poll rate affect the battery usage much?

                • AmbiguousProps@lemmy.todayEnglish
                  11 days

                  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?

    • jabberwockiX@piefed.socialEnglish
      12 days

      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.

      • Schwim Dandy@piefed.zipEnglish
        5 days

        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.