Life360: Family Safety & GPS - Apps on Google Play
play.google.com
All-in-one family safety: location sharing, crash alerts, driver reports & more

Hi there, everyone.

For various reasons, our family makes use of Life360. I’m wanting to move to either a linux or completely degoogled phone(ATM, I’m on Graphene but utilize the Play store for Life360 and a few other apps) but can’t afford not to have the ability for a group of 4 phones to share their locations with each other all the time, not just to send a pin at certain times. I ONLY need the real time sharing to other devices in the group, I don’t need anything else that Life360 offers.

It can’t be hard to use as one of the phones we need it on is owned by an 80yo with cognitive/memory issues. This is where Life360 shines, we’re able to find him without him ever needing to do anything on his phone.

Is there an option for this out there for self hosting? I could even handle not self-hosted but multi-OS and non-Play connected. I do have a couple VPS I could run backend software on, if needed.

Thanks for your time!

  • AmbiguousProps@lemmy.todayEnglish
    40·
    13 hours ago

    I use Home Assistant for this. It works very well and the data is all local. It’s probably a bit heavy if you don’t use the other parts of home assistant though.

    • Hominine@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      13 hours ago

      After several projects this is the best solution by my lights. The home assistant companion app coupled with tasker is pretty powerful. You can call remote location updates via intents and use taskerHA plugin for back and forth communication between the two.

    • yestalgia@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      12 hours ago

      Do you know if it works well with GrapheneOS?

      Does it use http or MQTT?

      I was using Traccar and that worked well until moving to GOS and then background updates wouldn’t work.

      I tried owntrack and nextcloud but never got it to work.

      • dan@upvote.auEnglish
        4·
        11 hours ago

        Does it use http or MQTT?

        Home Assistant uses HTTP for this. Realistically, you won’t see much difference between HTTP and MQTT for this use case.

        MQTT is harder to secure than HTTP, and has some limitations (eg it normally only supports username and password auth - no SSO, no 2FA) so I’d avoid it for anything public-facing unless you have a specific reason to use it. Using it via a VPN is fine, but you’d still need to configure a separate MQTT username and password per user.

        • Faceman🇦🇺@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          2·
          6 hours ago

          Sorry, misworded that, I meant it isn’t as good as a dedicated self hosted FOSS tracking service. meaning HA has access to my location data but i’ve also put lots of third party addons and integrations into HA that have to be trusted with access to that information too.

          A dedicated service would be a bit easier for peace of mind as it would be isolated.