Location history / timeline

[ph00lt0]

As requested on Matrix.

I would love to see a location history feature much like Google offers as Timeline in Google Maps.

An overview of location and time of where one has been per day would be amazing. Might be good to have a configurable interval to have the user decide on battery impact of this.

Please let me know what you need to make this happen.

[biodranik]

There is already a "Recent track" feature working on iOS. It may be generalized. That feature needs careful design and implementation to be useful:

• How to save battery?
• How to easily configure/enable/disable?
• How to view location history in a convenient way?
• How to clear location history?
• How to let people know that it's not shared anywhere, so it is privacy-friendly?
• How to make it even more useful later? E.g. use it in search, in bookmarks, maybe share it in some cases with others?

[RedAuburn]

imo this feels a bit out of scope, there are already solutions such as nextcloud PhoneTrack and OwnTracks (although we could integrate with them)

[ph00lt0]

A few comments:

imo this feels a bit out of scope, there are already solutions such as nextcloud PhoneTrack and OwnTracks (although we could integrate with them)

Nextcloud phone track is not a stable solution. Besides it not working well in terms of logging location, it does not have a day by day view. This is more a solution that can show where you have been ever. Yes some data is present but there is no visualization. Owntrack afaik also relies on Nextcloud Phonetrack.

To address @biodranik's very valid questions: Obviously a feature like this will consume battery. But so does it when using Google Maps. When relying on Google's location I don't see why this would have much more impact. With GPS it surely would consume more but this can be a choice of the end user. May not be as bad for people who drive a lot and have it connected to the car anyway.

Yeah a feature to turn and off with a toggle in the a history tab would be great.

I think great inspiration can be taken from Google Timeline. Have a map on top showing the locations per day and the routes and below a list of locations with timestamps (start-end) of location a user has remained let's say over 15min.Allow the user to swipe back and forward between the dates. A date picker that could be opened from an icon on top would also make sense.

For clearing history one could look at how browsing history can be deleted: last hour, last day, last week, all.

I think location history should not be turned on by default. When user presses the toggle they can be informed with a pop up explaining that the data remains on the device and is not shared by the app.

[PanderMusubi]

Nextcloud Phonetrack shows in screenshots visualizations. Perhaps since its update three weeks ago. Worth looking into again to integrate with it?

If integration is worthwhile, perhaps also sync bookmarks with it.

[biodranik]

What are the pros and cons of this integration? How important is it for most users?