Location Sharing

So I used to share real time location on g**gle maps with my wife which has been handy. I don’t see a similar function in Magic Earth. Can I do this with ME or can someone suggest a simple and trusted app for this? Or do I have to make one?

jv

Regain your privacy! Adopt /e/ the unGoogled mobile OS and online servicesphone

Does this fit the bill? OsmAnd - Offline Mobile Maps and Navigation
(OSMand Tracker)

If I understand you correctly our family does something like you describe with Telegram, where there is an intergral

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Interesting thanks, I didn’t know about this and I use both OSM and Telegram (occasionally). But it looks like this is limited to 24 hours of sharing that is user initiated? I am looking for something that is always on like google was even if it didn’t update that frequently.

How about an app like Finder from F-Droid? Looks like it can send location via SMS on demand to trusted contacts. There may be an auto-send feature…I don’t know or use it myself.

Or GPSLogger. “Automatically upload or email the file at set intervals…”

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(Fascinated why anyone would want such self disclosure) I couldn’t help doing a little research! I find this in Apps, I pass it on because the documentation looks so good!

https://owntracks.org/booklet/

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(Maybe a little out-of-topic)

If you own a NextCloud instance, you could try PhoneTrack - Apps - App Store - Nextcloud

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Thanks!

Owntracks looks interesting but a bit complicated and too many “features”.

And yes, the goal is to share location with trusted people like my wife. We do that now with g**gle and it is handy sometimes. I would want to do it without sharing identifiable information.

I have one designed “in my head” now and last night I actually jumped in and fiddled with the google maps example app to dip my toe back in to Android programming. I will also look at Qt creator as an easier way for cross platform apps.

The idea I came up with was to make a simple app to push current location and pull current locations of friends with https json. The server would only save current location and users are only identified anonymously with a guid. (they can then voluntarily share their name or whatever that only their friends would see). Users would connect with friends with sharing their guid with friends which would create a 2 way visibility link which would be revocable from either side to break the connection.

My app would show a list of friends and you would select one to show the current location on Magic Earth. That’s it (and that’s all the API for Magic Earth allows unless I wanted to push the whole friends list in as “favorite” and overwrite the location each time – a bit of a kludge but could work).

Owntracks looks like they support a HTTP push API so maybe I could use their client but it would still need more configuration to use. Might be OK to use just with my wife.

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Thanks all. I set up a Traccar server and playing with Owntracks but they don’t do “friends” when working together. Still thinking of ideas. I summarized it here: Degoogled Tracking – Volcano.Newts.Org

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So the final answer for now that I am using with my wife is Owntracks, plaintext with encrypted payload to my own MQTT broker. There’s no storage of location. Later I may enable TLS on mosquito and not encrypt the payload as I have some ideas I want to have a python client for another purpose and there’s python modules that support TLS but I would have to implement the matching libsodium to decrypt the payload from Owntracks and that seems like more work as well as TLS is the “right” way to do it anyway.

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If something is still looking for a similar app, TICE may be what you need: TICE – Secure GPS Location Sharing with Friends | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository

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