Hi there,
recently there has been a post here about Colota and thought you might be interested in a short summary about Colota.
I am tracking my position since several years now mainly with Owntracks (and now Colota) and a simple postgres DB/table.
I am a fan of the indieweb and eat what you cook and with already some million location points collected I recognized some pattern in existing GPS trackers I wasn't happy about:
- Battery consumption
- Duplicate points while staying in the same location for a long time
So I decided to build my own GPS tracker and called it Custom Location Tracker.
Improved battery consumption should come from disabling GPS entirely in so called "geofences" which are basically circles you draw on a map in the app. With GPS disabled in these you also won't get duplicate points while staying at e.g. home or work.
The app is still quite new (actively developed since early 2026) but has already quite a lot of features which basically all came from user feedback. E.g.:
- Automatic Tracking profiles which apply different tracking settings while e.g. being connected to Android Auto, moving slower than 6km/h or while the phone is currently charging.
- The app works fully offline (map will not be visible then) but you can predownload map tiles from a tile server I selfhost or use your own tile server.
- You can define how locations are synced to your backend. E.g. only for a specific Wi-Fi SSID every 15min, once a day or with every location update.
Overall the app's focus should move to be a mobile location history app. So basically Google Timeline in a mobile app which also supports selfhosted backends (as backup).
The app is fully open-source AGPL-3.0, has no ads, analytics or telemetry and only sends data to your own server (if you want to).
You can download two versions.
- Google Play store which uses Fused Location Provider and therefore uses Google APIs. Also works with the sandboxed version by GrapheneOS and microG.
- FOSS version which uses Android's native GPS provider with a network location fallback. Available on IzzyOnDroid and hopefully someday on F-droid.
Both can be also downloaded directly from the repo.
Do you recommend the sandboxed play store / Fused location providor version over the fdroid or is it a negligible dkfference?
FusedLocationProvider (GMS version) is generally better for most users. It combines GPS, WiFi, cell tower and sensor data for faster GPS fixes and better battery efficiency. The FOSS version uses raw LocationManager with GPS as primary and network as fallback. It works but GPS fixes can be slower, especially indoors. But if avoiding (sandboxed) Play Services is a priority, the FOSS version works fine too.