Trying to use PhoneTrack as a Google Maps Timeline replacement

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I have been looking for something to replace Google Maps Timeline, ie something that will run in the background on my phone and tell me where I was at any given time on any given day.

It seems that PhoneTrack should be able to do that, but I am struggling to get it working.

I have installed the PhoneTrack Android app v 0.1.0 on my phone (Android V15), and I have installed PhoneTrack (v 0.9.1) on my Nextcloud server (it’s a managed instance from Hetzner, I don’t run it myself, and the current version is 31.0.10).

This has been partially successful. The phone app will sync with the web interface to PhoneTrack on my nextcloud server, and I can see the points that the PhoneTrack Android app has recorded on the web interface.

The problem is that the PhoneTrack Android app is pretty picky about when it will record locations. If I open up the app manually, then it will record them. But not otherwise. Once the app is closed, it won’t record locations any more. It is as if there is somewhere I need to give it permission or tweak a setting to allow it to run in the background by itself, but if such a setting exists, I haven’t found it.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks

Adam

2

OK, I think I’ve figured this out. If anyone else is having the same problem, this is what worked for me.

As I suspected, the problem was indeed that the app didn’t have permission to run in the background. The trick is that this is not fixed by adjusting the app permissions in the phone settings, you have to look somewhere else.

Go to Settings, then Apps, then choose the PhoneTrack app. Ignore “Permissions” (assuming you’ve already given the app permission for location, which is also needed), but instead choose “App battery usage”. There there is an option for “Allow background usage”. Mine was switched off. When I turned it on, the app immediately started working as intended.

That’s how it works on Android 15, at any rate. The way of getting at settings does seem to change from one Android version to another, so if you’re using a different Android version, YMMV.

3

Well. I think I may have been a bit premature in saying I’d fixed it.

Setting the “allow background usage” option in the battery seconds did mean that the app worked for the rest of the day when I did it, but since then it seems to have gone back to only working if I actually open the app. It no longer tracks my movements without my intervention.

Any idea if there are any other settings I should be looking at?

4

OK, I think I’ve more or less solved it.

The trick is not to use the PhoneTrack Android app, but to use OwnTracks instead. That seems far more reliable than the PhoneTrack app and plays nicely with the PhoneTrack server: once you set up a session on the server you can get various kinds of links to it, one of which is specifically stated as an OwnTracks link. If you use the http method in the OwnTracks app, then it connects to the server reliably.

The only downside of this method is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to view your location history in the OwnTracks app.

I wonder if it’s possible to use the PhoneTrack app for this, connecting to the session which is being populated by OwnTracks in some kind of view only mode? Anyone know?