this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2026
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Any self-hosted option for real time location sharing? (play.google.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by schwim@piefed.zip to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hi there, everyone.

For various reasons, our family makes use of Life360. I'm wanting to move to either a linux or completely degoogled phone(ATM, I'm on Graphene but utilize the Play store for Life360 and a few other apps) but can't afford not to have the ability for a group of 4 phones to share their locations with each other all the time, not just to send a pin at certain times. I ONLY need the real time sharing to other devices in the group, I don't need anything else that Life360 offers.

It can't be hard to use as one of the phones we need it on is owned by an 80yo with cognitive/memory issues. This is where Life360 shines, we're able to find him without him ever needing to do anything on his phone.

Is there an option for this out there for self hosting? I could even handle not self-hosted but multi-OS and non-Play connected. I do have a couple VPS I could run backend software on, if needed.

Thanks for your time!

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[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

ElementX (main mobile matrix client) has live location sharing that works in group chats. Be aware that any location sharing system that loads map data (tiles) from a server automatically leaks your location to that server. The only way to solve this would be to have all the map tiles required stored offline but I'm not aware of any solution that does this. The simplest way to achieve maximum privacy is to just have something that automatically shares just the coordinates as a text message at a regular interval then you can open those coordinates in an offline map app.

As you can see here, the map tiles are loaded from "MapLibre" when using ElementX or rather its cool fork SchildiChatNext. That means MapLibre would technically know roughly where you are and have been. All apps that dont prompt you to download large chunks of map data in advance will load map tiles on demand and expose your location.

https://schildi.chat/next/