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.
I like AirVPN, my main issue is server stability. iVPN and Mullvad at least were able to maintain a connection continuously for weeks on end across various networks, but this is not the case for AirVPN. It’s to the point where I’m considering alternatives because I’ll start using my device only to find out the VPN tunnel has died and I have to manually reconnect it.
That’s quite a statement, are you sure about that? The Graphene team has done a considerable amount of work sandboxing the environment of Google Play, both in memory, permission structure, and IO access that MicroG completely blows past. Given how the Graphene sandboxing works, I actually can’t think of a scenario where the statement that MicroG is more private than Graphene sandboxed Google Play. In either scenario you don’t have to log in, so I’d much rather have an environment that has been isolated than tooling that still has tendrils reaching into the main OS itself (MicroG).
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.