A while back, a friend showed me an application they had started using called OwnTracks, which periodically sends location updates from your phone to your own server. I used to collect similar location data back in the day via Google Latitude, so the idea of self-hosting my own tracking history intrigued me. Fast forward a few months, and I finally got around to setting it up.
Shortly after, another friend decided to set it up as well and mentioned wanting to import their historical Google Timeline exports into it. I hadn’t even considered that, but I loved the idea of giving it a shot since I had years of location data sitting around. A day or two later, I had my data fully ingested and viewable in OwnTracks, dating all the way back to mid-2010.
The first hurdle I ran into was that iOS Google Maps exports use a different format than the Android versions, requiring me to patch the import script to handle the iOS payload. Using an LLM coding assistant, I threw some sample data at it, and it quickly generated everything OwnTracks needed to ingest the files.
However, I quickly discovered that Google Maps on iOS logs far less granular data than it does on Android. Thankfully, I still had my old Android phone from when Google originally moved Timeline data on-device. That phone contained my complete, detailed history from my Android years up until my switch to iPhone, so I dutifully ingested that data too.