Hi @jonathan-berthet,
Interesting project idea — and I say that as someone who spent years driving trucks for a large international freight company, so I have a very good sense of what fleet management actually looks like on the ground.
But I think there’s an important distinction to make before investing months of development: you’ve described a use case, not an app. What you’re aiming at is essentially a “Swiss Army knife” — a jack of all trades, master of none — and that rarely ends well in open-source projects with limited contributor bandwidth.
Almost everything on your feature list is already handled by existing Nextcloud apps — and the list below is just what came to mind immediately, there are many more in the app store:
| Your planned feature |
Existing app |
| Vehicle registry, booking, scheduling |
Calendar Resource Management — already handles vehicles (make, model, seats, electric/range) as bookable resources in the Nextcloud Calendar |
| Maintenance scheduling with reminders |
Nextcloud Calendar + Tasks |
| Maintenance work orders, checklists, responsible persons |
Deck |
| Cost tracking per vehicle |
Cospend, Money, or Budget |
| Statistics dashboard, charts, CSV/PDF export |
Analytics |
| Document storage (manuals, registration, insurance) |
Nextcloud Files |
| Work hours per technician/vehicle |
ArbeitszeitCheck / Attendance |
| Team and role management |
Nextcloud Groups / Teams |
| Vehicle documentation, SOPs, manuals |
Collectives |
| GPS tracking |
PhoneTrack |
Building all of this from scratch — authentication, permissions, calendar integration, statistics, file management, charts, export — would take years and result in a worse version of tools that already exist and are actively maintained.
What would actually be new and valuable:
The genuine gap is a lightweight app that:
- Stores vehicle-specific structured data: odometer readings over time, VIN, insurance details, registration expiry
- Acts as the glue linking a vehicle to its bookings in
calendar_resource_management, its maintenance cards in Deck, its costs in a money app like Cospend or similar, and its documents in Files etc.
That is a realistic scope for a contributor-supported open-source project. It adds real value without duplicating half the app store.
The mental model shift: instead of “one app that does everything for fleet management”, think “one app that holds the vehicle identity and links the existing tools together around it”. That’s a much smaller surface area to build and maintain, and it means your users get best-in-class calendar, cost tracking, and analytics rather than a home-grown version of each.
Where development energy should go — after defining what the glue layer needs — is into improving existing apps where they fall short for fleet use cases. That contribution model is far more sustainable and benefits the whole Nextcloud ecosystem, not just Vehicula users.
A concrete example from my own experience:
When I was driving, I used Nextcloud to manage freight documents and my logbook. Files synced to the desktop via the Nextcloud client, accessible via the web frontend from the cab — with a printer in the truck I could print completed freight documents on the spot, which matters as paperless processes roll out unevenly across the industry. Smart group-based permissions determined who could see what. No custom app needed — just the right existing tools in the right places.
On telemetry:
You mention wanting telemetry integration — live vehicle data, GPS, possibly OBD or manufacturer APIs. That alone is not a feature, it’s several independent projects: a mobile app or hardware interface to collect the data, integration with each manufacturer’s proprietary API (every OEM does this differently), and a backend to store and visualize it. PhoneTrack covers part of this already. The rest would be a significant standalone effort before a single line of Vehicula itself is written.
Just my 2 cents
ernolf