Hey, it’s been a minute! Dawarich is your favorite FOSS selfhostable alternative to Google Timeline, remember? We’ve shipped a lot since the last post and I’m here to tell you all about it.

Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich

Website: https://dawarich.app/

First, a picture to get your attention:

Before we start with the great stuff, let me talk a bit about good stuff as well. Release 1.8.0 introduced a new mechanism to let you know about new releases. It works through my new application called Chibichange (https://chibichange.com/).

TL;DR: there is a Chibichange widget shipped in Dawarich, which, if you consent, will ping chibichange.com to check if there are new updates for your Dawarich instance. If there is a new version, a green pulsing dot will be shown in Dawarich navbar, click on it, and you’ll see what’s changed in Dawarich since your current version. Feature suggestion and voting coming to chibichange soon.

Important: this is an opt-in feature, no external requests will be made if you click “No thanks”. If you say “no”, there will be the usual exclamation mark beside the version if there is a new release on Github, but, sadly, no in-app changelogs.

A bit more context: I built Chibichange to have a way to conveniently deliver changelogs to Dawarich users, and soon it’ll also allow you to suggest features, vote them up and provide feedback. Suggested features, if we decide to build them, will be added to our public roadmap. By the way, we recently added a roadmap: https://dawarich.app/roadmap/. Will update it soon with more cool stuff we’ve planned.

Chibichange will be open-sourced this summer and will have same model as Dawarich: FOSS self-hostable software with an optional cloud service for those who don’t want to self-host it. This is a very niche tool, but I hope it will be useful to those in similar position, building self-hostable or otherwise software.

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Okay, let’s get back to Dawarich news.

The big one this time: we now draw your flights on the map. If you self-host AirTrail, Dawarich can pull your flight history and render it as proper arcs on Map V2. Set it up on the Integrations page, hit “Sync now”, and it re-syncs daily on its own. Finally your map knows you didn’t teleport across the ocean.

There will be more for flights in the future.

Trips got a full redesign. The whole trip page is now built on MapLibre V2 — a sticky map on the left, and a scrollable day-by-day accordion on the right with per-day distance and times, day-colored routes, a photo overlay toggle, and a replay scrubber to play the trip back. You can also drop a short note on any individual day of a trip now. I’m really happy with how this one came out.

Public sharing is a whole new thing. Trips, tracks, live location and selected time ranges can now be shared via a public, optionally phrase-protected link. Public trip pages look pretty much the same as the in-app ones, with toggles to pick exactly what the page exposes — route, stats, countries, day-by-day, notes, photos, whatever you want.

Here’s a public link to my Norway road trip from the screenshot above: https://my.dawarich.app/s/07024d88-0c43-4554-ad89-d7f2916b7d57

Visit detection got rewritten. There’s a new opt-in stay-point detector — non-ML, single pass, and it gives each suggested visit a 0–100 confidence score. It fixes the old algorithm’s biggest annoyances: missing slow stays, and splitting one visit in two when your phone’s battery died for a bit. It’s behind a flag for now while I gather feedback, but it’ll become the default soon. You can also now label a visit by searching for the real place name right in the Timeline.

What else?

• Multi-device tracks no longer get mangled — if you track from a phone and a watch and a GPS unit, each device stays on its own track instead of becoming one zigzagging mess.
• Fog of War can now reveal per-hexagon, not just per-point.
• Globe view is now on by default.
• Big import improvements: GPX files now stream instead of loading entirely into memory (no more OOM on huge exports), Garmin FIT files are supported, Google’s “Timeline Edits.json” Takeout is recognized, and the official Traccar client is now supported directly.
• Fixed Immich photo timestamps that could be off by up to 24 hours, monthly stats now bucket by your local timezone, and a pile of timezone/DST crashes are gone.
• You can now run the containers as a custom user via PUID/PGID, OIDC fixes (trailing slash + PKCE), and a 2FA lockout to keep accounts safe.
• And, as always, literally a TON of other fixes. Bugs too, sorry, one can’t go without the other.

Gentle reminder: Map V1 (Leaflet) is being sunsetted this August. Everything new is being written for V2, and it’s better in basically every way — but if there’s something from V1 you’d miss, tell me and I’ll figure it out. Vector maps are the future!

Also, a glimpse into the future, I found an awesome tool to generate maps, bent it in couple places to work with Dawarich, and poster generation will be a thing soon!

I was so excited about how well it worked out, that I even researched if it’d be possible to plug an “Order” button into Dawarich, and, well, yes. Probably not gonna automate it right away, will just add the “Order” button beside the “Download” one for created posters, and will see how it goes. Anyway, it could be a good to support the development for anyone willing to do so, while getting a very nice personalized thingy you can actually hang on your wall. Man I love these posters.

We’ve finally released an update for our mobile apps, with the new logo, bug fixes and a registration flow that will have no use to selfhosters, but still is important thing to have. Annoying bug with the map not being rendered in dark mode is fixed, yay. Also, we had to re-list our Android app in Google Play Store, so the update will require you to download it separately and reauthenticate. Make sure you’ve uploaded all the data you had not yet uploaded in the old app. New app’s page: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.dawarich.Dawarich

We’ll still release a small update for the old one with a banner suggesting an update. Sorry for this inconvenience.

This mobile release took a lot of efforts and tons of testing, but it opens new possibilities for us, and in the next one we want to focus on battery consumption optimization and, finally, will start making more steps towards feature parity with the web app.

I guess that would be it for today! I actually wanted to write a post every month, but, well, it’s also too good to post one every other month :)

Saving you a scroll:

Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich

Website: https://dawarich.app/

iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dawarich/id6739544999

Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.dawarich.Dawarich

Donate: https://www.patreon.com/freika / https://github.com/sponsors/Freika/

P.S. I got my shit together and started tinkering on another app, which, once done and production ready, will open lots of new possibilities for Dawarich, check it out: https://atlas.dawarich.app/. It’s basically self-hostable offline maps for homelabbers, built on shoulders of titans: Overpass, Photon, Valhalla and some other great mapping tools, under a single UI and API. I’ll create a separate post here once it’s mature enough. Map matching comes to Dawarich, baby!

P.P.S If you’re in Berlin, I’ll be doing a presentation on Dawarich on Geomob, a mapping meetup, 1st of October. Come say hi, I may have stickers for you by then!