Hello there, my dearest people of Selfhosted!

I’m Evgenii, the developer and maintainer of Dawarich, a free, open-source, self-hostable alternative to Google Timeline, and I brought you a fresh portion of updates we made in October 2026.

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AI Disclosure (as per https://lemmy.world/post/49320548):

Implementation - Generated

Testing - Assisted

Design - Assisted

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As always, our links:

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

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Less bugs

So, what we brought to Dawarich in October? First of all, A TON of bugfixes. I released fixes for and closed roughly ~150 bug reports, plus the stuff I discovered myself. For months, number of open issues on GitHub was somewhere between 100 and 150, and I was struggling to keep up with the new reports. But in October I was finally able to build a proper system around this and now reproducing, finding the root and fixing a bug is a lot faster process. As of today, we have ~40 open issues on Github, most of which are either feature requests (I usually convert them to Discussions on Github, under “Ideas” section) or bug reports related to our mobile apps. I hope to reduce this number further before the year ends. For the mobile apps development pace is naturally a bit slower, due to how releasing process works in AppStore and Google Play, but we’re addressing issues reported for them as well.

Made it faster and slimmer

Now, historically, due to tech stack of my choice, Dawarich consisted of 4 docker containers: the app itself, sidekiq for background jobs, redis for cache and sidekiq jobs queue, and postgresql for the database. I know it bothered some of our users, so I found the way to reduce number of docker containers to 3 by putting Sidekiq into the app container. It was introduced in 1.17.0 and works well, here’s your updating guide: https://dawarich.app/docs/self-hosting/updating/#one-container-for-the-app-and-background-jobs

Also, in the same release, thanks to one container less and some other optimizations, idling memory consumption went down, from ~480mb to ~230mb. Feels good, innit? And since we’re here talking performance, Trips pages are now a LOT faster, same as Points index page. Data imports and reverse geocoding speed were also improved, with more speed ups are being in progress right now.

No more Places and Areas mess. Also, Geofencing!

First, there were Areas, that you could draw on the map and detect visits within, then I added Places, that were created either from detected visits or manually by user. It was kinda inconvenient to have both, so I finally found the time to convert Areas to Places, add a radius to Places so the would act as Areas, and introduced geofencing as a cherry in top. Phew! So now you can create a place, set a radius to detect visits (upto 50km) and configure webhooks on enter-leave events. Enter the designated area -> Enter event triggered -> configured webhook is sent to your HomeAssistant, NodeRed, N8n, or whatever other service you prefer to use. Add some imagination and maybe you could configure push notifications. Complete freedom, yay!

Privacy zones

As much as I would love people to create videos about Dawarich (which they do, and they’re awesome!), it’s obvious nobody wants to doxx themselves by exposing their home location on a video. So a while ago I introduced Privacy zones for tags, and now updated them to work across all the maps in Dawarich, be it the Map page, Trips, Posters, Replays, publicly shared pages, you name it. Basically it works like this:

1. Create a place you want to hide your location data around
2. Create a tag with a privacy zone enabled, configure privacy radius
3. Assign the tag to the place from step 1
4. All done!

What’s important, the place tagged with a privacy zone’d tag is not in the middle of the radius, so it won’t be possible to establish exact location by simply putting a finger in the center of hidden radius. Here’s a short demo of how the feature works: https://youtu.be/CIl09RAVSBI

Some other notable changes:

• Some features can be now disabled in the settings, for now it’s Family and Achievements
• New Achievements were added: City explorer, National parks, Returning to a place after a while, and some more. This feature has a huge potential so the cards sets will be expanded further. If you don’t like, see the point one of this list :)
• Stats were moved to Insights page for unification purposes
• You can now import your checkins from Foursquare Swarm

Lots of other, smaller, things were introduced and/or changes, so as always, I’d recommend to keep your eyes on changelogs and create backups before updating :)

The mobile apps

We worked on them, too :) As always, some work was done to improve battery consumption and performance, on Android specifically, we added Photos and Hexagons layers to the map, some fixes for widgets, and a supporter badge in the web for those who purchased Self-Hoster Pro plan in the mobile app. Because every way of supporting matters and we would love to give back to the community.

Almost forgot: Dawarich is now available on your Apple Watch and WearOS :) Some screenshots below:

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Stickers

We’ve sent first batch of stickers to our users from Germany, and I expect to send ~50 more envelopes to the rest of the world next week. If you’d like to receive some, leave your address in this form: https://tally.so/r/1A1DBg

Turns out, manually signing all the envelopes and postcards (I’m adding one to each envelope until they last) is a time-consuming job and a lot less fun than tapping buttons on a keyboard, but I managed to do it with the help of my lovely wife :D Gotta figure something out to simplify the process though, especially if there will be more people requesting stickers :)

Small reminder, the idea behind stickers is that you stick them in the place of your travels and (optionally) send me a picture of the place with the sticker with coordinates, so later I could put them together to a map, marking travelings of our users :)

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Transportation modes experiment

In Dawarich, we have transportation mode detection for tracks. Based on speed, acceleration and some other parameters, an estimation is being done on backend, whether part of a track walked by foot, cycled, driven or flown. It’s pretty unreliable in its current form, so I have this idea, where you, the community, can help. I drafted a tool, where you can load your GPX files and mark track segments up, by providing information on what transportation mode the segment belongs to.

It all works in your browser and no coordinates nor timestamps being sent anywhere. When you finish, you can click “Review & Send” and only then features of the marked up track segments will be uploaded. You’ll be able to see what exactly is being sent before it’s sent to make sure no private data leaves your device.

Later on, when there is enough data for each transportation mode, I’ll try to compose a tool that will accept a gpx track and return most probable transportation mode for it. If all goes well and the tool works as intended, I will open source it under permissive license. It will also be distributed as part of Dawarich, which will benefit from more reliable transportation mode detection. Once it’s reliable enough, this opens some new possibilities for features long asked by the community.

Here’s the link, if you want to help: https://transportation-modes.dawarich.app/

Thanks!

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It’s fascinating, that after two years of Dawarich being in development I still have TONS of ideas, both for the web app and the mobile app. Kinda envy myself a bit, haha. Lots of stuff to port from our web to mobile, new features, improvements.

Thank you all for that. There would be no Dawarich without you, people using it, loving it and sharing it with your friends.

As always, more awesome stuff to come, see you in the next one!

P.S.

Links to save you a scroll:

GitHub

Website

iOS

Android

Support development: GitHub Sponsors / Patreon