Hi, I’m looking for an alternative to Google’s Find my phone that can be self hosted. Most important feature would be to see the last known location of a mobile phone without disclosing the location to any third party system. It would be nice to have features like making the phone ring or wiping the phone remotely.
Happy to hear any ideas what you people are using.
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Little known feature on Home Assistant is the ability to have any phone who has home assistant installed to be able to use it as a trigger. So you can see things like battery left and gps location. I have an automations that will ping the last location of my family members when the phone hits 2% power so I can see their last location right before the phone dies.
great idea, but a suggestion.
instead of just one ping at 2%, do three within 10 seconds of each other. this would determine direction and rate of travel.
You can just remotely enable high accuracy mode for a minute and it will trace their path on a map cleanly.
_action: notify.mobile_app_your_fone metadata: {} data: message: device_high_accuracy_mode data: silent: true high_accuracy_mode: turn_on channel: loc __Ohhhhhh fantastic idea!!
I use home assistant and have a dashboard button that triggers an automation.
Using the notification action, I turn off do-not-disturb, turn off Bluetooth (so it doesn’t pipe sound to earbuds or remote audio), set notification mode to on (not vibrate) and set the notification volume to max. I used to loop the default notification sound, but then switched so that the notification uses a new channel entirely and set each phone with a song so it will play for a while. You can silence it with the volume key.
Took a little tinkering to get it right, but works really well.
How do you ping a location update? I’ve tried sending the hidden sms that’s supposed to do is but it only seems to work about 25% of the time, and I have to run the actual location check like 3-4 minutes later
Don’t use sms. Use the home assistant notify skill. It will notify my phone using the notify.notify skill.
But if I’m going to do 3 pings for the direction of the pings, then I gotta figure out a different solution.
https://fmd-foss.org/ Here you go :)
Works awesome, Dev is super responsive. Donate if you can.
I am using this one. Texting or messaging my phone (on anything that makes a notification popup) with the text “fmd password location” gives me GPS coords. More than enough for me, and works even from a borrowed stranger’s phone.
Setup steps require ADB though, because in the phone ecosystem getting “unusual” permissions usually requires business deals with Google/Apple.
You have a pin, right?
Definitely have to check this out, thanks man!
Brilliant!
How does it go for chewing thru the phone battery tho?
I have been hosting my own server for a few months bow. Works amazingly. One thing is their seems to be two versions of the server, make sure the one you install is the actively maintained one.
That sounds great. Will check it out.
Just set this up myself. Its quite nice
FYI, I came across an app called FindFamily on F-Droid, but it looks like a vibe-coded vaporware, and who knows what server it’s connecting to in the background.
On device, I’d trust OwnTracks, Colota, or GPSLogger, then use Dawarich or Reitti on the server. That is, if you are interested in device history, which could be useful in tracking a lost device, or just having your personal memoies saved.
These do not provide defensive measures like photo or remote wiping. FMD can do that over SMS if the phone is disconnected from the server.
I think I will try a combination if dawarich and FMD. Any reason other apps like colota are preferred to the dawarich app on the device?
Never tried it. It looks like maybe the mobile app is not available from open source repos.
Ah it seems they released the android app very recently and it is not FOSS.
if theft is a concern. record IMEI number and they(carriers etc) will probably blacklist the phone from mobile networks and maybe aid the tracking(investigation…if any). which, afterwards, lowers resale value
Not self hosted but this works great. https://preyproject.com/
I use Dawarich on my server and Colota as the app on my phones. It is quite good but has some minor shortcomings with multiple devices and being able to see previous routes ONLY FOR THE ACCOUNT YOU’RE LOGGED INTO (so not family member phones) but is fine for live location for all devices. Also you use a browser to track location instead of an app which is a minor annoyance.
I had been using Traccar and liked that but after moving to GrapheneOS, the Traccar client would not stay running in background.
I tried FMD-FOSS and couldn’t get it to fully work. This serves a different purpose than those listed above and I ended up not really needing it.
I tried all of the other popular options and even linking one to Nextcloud and didn’t care for them or couldn’t get them to work. Reitti and GPS Logger worked but I prefer Dawarich and Colota.
I had this and switched to reitti with owntracks specifically to work with multiple family accounts. Owntracks is not as nice as Colota in most ways, but shows the live location of my family. I had some stability issues with dawarich using multiple devices (most likely user error) but liked it. I do think that reitti has a nicer interface and features, but probably a matter of taste.
