I think a couple of months ago I found out about Dawarich here on this community as the author posted here. I installed a couple of days ago on a VM I run and have been impressed so far. I started logging track 10 years ago when I found out about OsmAND and never really knew what I would do with those tracks until I discovered Dawarich. Interesting piece of software. With the “trips” function, it reminded me of my trip to Scotland and all the places I had seen on which day.
Now the challenge is to understand why Owntracks feeds it a couple of points a day and only when I’m at home. I thought Owntracks would log locally on mobile phone and then download everything on Dawarich when it was back online on the VLAN at home (i don’t have external access setup and don’t want to for now). Is this some server side problem or a app problem? I’ve not changed the default settings of either the Dawarich server or the app. Any clues? I was goign to try the Dawarich android app but its not on f-droid so will need to wait until it is (strictly on GOS and no Google where I live ;-)
Since Ive never been able to get Dawarich running I’ll leave this project here an case someone is in the same boat:
I would try to use GPSLogger, it is capable of sending data to dawarich and is really reliable. AFAIK, the Owntracks app has a queue and normally sends the data back when it is online, but I also found that this is sometimes not the case, and there is no way of restoring it then. GPSLogger has the advantage that it stores the GPX file also on your phone; if something goes wrong, you can still grab that and upload it.
Colota also seems like an awesome alternative. I’ve only heard good things about it.
Cool, thanks. Both are on fdroid which is cool
For some reason when i do a search it doesn’t find them. Then when i click on a link provided by someone it’t there …how annoying. But yes, i downloaded Colota today and impressed thus far. I need to get profile to do what i want still …
Colota dev here 👋 What do you want the profiles to do?
Profiles are an optional thing to finetune your tracking settings based on certain conditions, e.g. speed above or below x km/h, phone charging, Android Auto connected or being stationary. So you could raise the interval while charging, since that usually means you are not moving. To start with you could also make a pause zone at home and at work and turn on the WiFi pause. GPS stops completely while you are there and the app will consume much less battery. Tracking resumes when the WiFi drops.
I would add one at a time and see if it behaves like you want. When you create like 10 different tracking profiles with different priorities they can interfere with each other, so less is often more.
Edit: Also the accuracy filter is off by default so you probably want to enable it to reduce the noise
Cool. So I have a driving profile that is logging every 5 seconds after I exceed 10km/h (movement threshold is 10m); activation/deactivation 0/60 respectively. I’m finding the tracks are not smooth and because point get logged once or twice in town roads (i.e. the track cuts roads). Is this profile recording one point every 5 secs if and only if I exceed 10km/h? In that case I would expect a lot more points logged. How do I tell it to log a point every 10 m for example? Rather than use time interval? Priority is 9 while my home profile (stationary) is 10.
A profile with “speed above 10 km/h” will kick in when the last 5 points average speed is above 10 km/h. The notification banner and dashboard will tell you if the profile is actually active.
If your interval for that profile is 5s, a new point will be requested every 5 seconds and with a 10m movement threshold every point closer than 10m to the last recorded point gets discarded.
So to get smoother tracks you can decrease the movement threshold.Personally I use a movement threshold of 2m with a tracking interval of 6 seconds which works very well for me.Logging points every 10m without a time interval is not possible, because the app needs a location to determine you moved 10m and Android needs an interval. A workaround would be to decrease the interval to something like 3 sec and set the movement threshold to 10m. Then the app will request a new location every 3 seconds and checks if it is at least 10m apart from the last point. If it is it will be recorded, otherwise it will be discarded. That will use a lot more battery though.
You can read more about the tracking profiles in the docs: https://colota.app/docs/guides/tracking-profiles
For places where you stay frequently (home, work, etc.) geofences work better. The stationary profile is good for situations where you are somewhere temporarily for longer (restaurant, friends, etc.)
Edit: Small correction after doing the math and reformatting after writing that on the phone 😂
Lowering the movement threshold will not smooth out a driving track. 10m at a 5s interval works out to 7.2 km/h, so above that speed every fix is already more than 10m from the last one and the threshold throws nothing away. So the tracking interval is your lever here. 5s at 50 km/h is a point roughly every 70m and even at a realistic average of 30 km/h it is still one every 40m, which is what cuts the corners.
I use Colota for tracking and feeding dawarich. Seems pretty reliable and reasonable on resources.
This honestly looks better than the actual Dawarich and community dawarich apps. I’ve also had a ton of problems keeping it tracking 24/7 for some reason so I’m gonna try this one for a bit. Thank you!
Reitti’s author also posted here some days ago.
Reitti does not have a dedicated app and is fed with GPSlogger, which is capable of feeding dawarich as well (or both at the same time), actually more reliably than the dawarich app in my experience (dawarich just stopped working after a couple of days and needed a full logout/login).
Edit: Colota mentioned ITT does the same.
You can give this a shot, it’ll cache the until you are back home then it’ll upload all of it. Plus it barely uses any battery. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.eneiluj.nextcloud.phonetrack/
It was last updated 6 years ago. GPSlogger seems to still be maintained




