I’m taking a long biking trip soon and want to share my live location with my boyfriend in case something happens. Any recommendations for privacy-focused apps that can accomplish this? I’m on Android, he’s on iOS.
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I started out with Owntracks. I found it to be unreasonably complex. I swapped to Traccar. It was much easier to get functional.
The nice thing about Apple’s Find My is that it runs in the background but only checks and sends your location when someone is actively looking at your location. Do these do that as well? I’ve tried Telegram’s location sharing before and it drains battery like crazy because it keeps the GPS receiver always on.
You change how frequently checks are performed. Traccar runs a simple every X seconds pattern. Default is 5 minutes. On 5 minute pings I see a 15-20% drain over the course of 24 hours, which seems reasonable, given that I’m on GrapheneOS and not leveraging Google’s location tracking simplifications. If you’re not on GrapheneOS your battery usage for location tracking will probably be better. Just not private.
Did you already look into osmand and telegram?
Did you respond to the right comment? I mentioned Telegram specifically and I’m fairly certain OsmAnd can’t do live location sharing.
That’s why I responded to you. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.osmand.telegram
I wouldn’t suggest a solution using telegram to anyone not already using it.
Oh, that’s a separate app, I wasn’t aware of that, no. Interesting, thanks! I don’t use Telegram anymore though.
I should note that my scenario was exactly the same. I wanted to share location with family. Additionally, Traccar supports temporary location share links for friends if you’d like. You’ll need to self-host it- I personally set up the Traccar server inside kubernetes and used Traefik for reverse proxy and SSL, but this is not necessary.
Self hosted is fine - I have a dev server I can toss it on. Thanks!
The alternative to Traccar is Find My Device (FMD)