Hello there my good people of self-hosted Lemmy! Dawarich got some new stuff since my last post, so here I (Evgenii) am, ready to tell all about it! Make yourself comfortable and prepare for awesome stuff :)
By the way, Dawarich — is your free (now and forever) open source self-hostable alternative to Google Timeline. And hey — we just reached 10k stars on Github! Yay! Here's a small bonus for you! https://youtu.be/-7o2WJPXMVw
AI Disclosure (as per https://lemmy.world/post/49320548):
Implementation - Generated
Testing - Generated
Design - Generated
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
First of all, tons of bugs were fixed. Right now I'm steadily keeping number of open issues on Github at around a hundred, and, hopefully, I'll be able to significantly reduce it in the upcoming months. It's time for Dawarich to get some more stability.
So, let's start with the big things!
Since 1.9.1, the following changes were introduced:
- Poster Studio: you can now generate posters, wallpapers or images for your social media, featuring your location history on the map, in a beautifully styled way. Check out screenshot below.

- You can also order a printed poster via our print-on-demand integration, thus supporting Dawarich development. Print quality is superb: I personally ordered two posters to test it, pictures are also can be found below. Important: it's built with privacy in mind, so nothing gets sent to our print-on-demand provider unless you explicitly click a button. Prices are 44,99€ for 30x40cm, 54,99€ for 50x70cm and 74,99€ for 70x100cm poster, printed on 200 gsm premium matte paper. Delivery and VAT included, for now — EU only.

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As a side-effect of the Poster Studio introduction, you can now apply same styles to your main map and customize the colors or provide custom schema for vector maps. It's pretty fancy, check it out!

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Dawarich can be installed as PWA! Pretty neat for read-only purposes on mobile, and I have some ideas on how to make it look nicer on mobile screens in the future.
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Replay upgrades — Polaroid photo pile, live photo-layer toggling, recenter & follow camera

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Google Takeout & Polarsteps imports now extract visits, named places, tracks, and transport modes, not just points (1.11.0); retroactive via "Extract additional data" on the Import page TCX/FIT/Google-takeout activity types now feed transportation-mode detection
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File imports stopped storing raw_data copies; streaming batches for large GeoJSON/Timeline files. Less space on disk taken, less memory during import consumed. Existing points are re-checked after upgrade, with tracks/stats/digests rebuilt on the lowest-priority queue. If you're updating and noticing resources consumption surge, just let it work through the background jobs.
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Self-hosted stack ~20% lighter: 452 → 325 MB app container, 843 → 690 MB total. I also have some more ideas on how to make it even slimmer later
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GET /api/v1/points endpoint now works up to 5 times faster than before
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ImageMagick removed from the image, making the docker image smaller
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Oh, and mobile app update was released, for now just for Android, iOS is following in a few days: you can now enable/disable points, routes, heatmap and visits layers, easily navigate between days and replay your daily movements. The iOS version will also include an (for now, optional) experimental tracking mode, that shown pretty good results, but it needs the famous blue arrow to be on all the time. The choice is yours. Oh, and Dawarich for mobile now eats a lot less of your phone battery. Thanks for all the detailed reports.

These are the most notable changes, but under the hood, there is a lot more. If you're interested, check our our Releases page ( https://github.com/Freika/dawarich/releases ), it's all there.
And now, that we're done with what's already there, let's talk a bit about the future.
Dawarich started as a tool to show location history on the map, but it became so much more since then (all thanks to you, by the way). In the nearest future, subjects of our primary focus are:
- Better mobile experience: UI, more feature parity with the web, better onboarding and family features
- Reworked Search UI
- Simpler and more concise UI overall across the app (I heard Timeline is not that easy to work with)
- Geofence (tell me about your use-cases!)
- Less bugs
- Two new locales (German & French, web first, mobile will follow)
- Better performance and architecture improvements
- I also want to play around MCP so your LLMs of choice could easily talk to Dawarich, improve visits detection and transportation mode detection, but the last two will take some work.
So yeah. As usual, lots of work behind us, even more is ahead of us. I want to say thank once again to all of you who are using Dawarich on daily basis, reporting bugs, suggesting features, opening PRs with fixes and new features supports us financially or just spread the word about the work we do. Without you guys there would be no Dawarich, so — thank y'all.
We also highly appreciate your donations, every single one makes a difference, whether it's a 1 time 1 euro donation or a recurring one on Patreon paid in full for the next year. Every single one of them brings us one step closer to a point where Konstantin (who is in charge of our mobile apps) and I will be able to spend more time polishing Dawarich.
If you happened to be (or know someone who is) a Youtube blogger, a podcaster or just have a blog, we'll be happy to talk to you in case you'd like to create something featuring Dawarich (or Dawarich Atlas for that matter, I'll be giving a talk on it on October's Berlin Geomob). So ping me!
As always, our links to save 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/
Thanks and see y'all in a ~month!
P.S. Cooking something legendary

Are the Android / iOS apps to be open sourced? I'd feel a lot more comfortable installing them if I could poke around in them first
We currently have no plans to open-source our own mobile apps, but Dawarich supports half-dozen 3rd party open source apps that can reliably track and upload your data