I have a long standing interest in monitoring my daily doings, I previously thought about putting a GPS tracker in my car, a good idea for both tracking my position and also checking to see if it has gone walkies (is stolen). I decided against doing this a while ago due to exams and lack of time to set the whole thing up. But I did decide to have a crack at this idea later with my phone.

The way I chose to go about this power hungry task was to use an app like IFTTT to record my position to a spreadsheet. But then I heard about owntracks, a purpose-built app for tracking your position. After setting up the owntracks server, MQTT and owntracks recorder. I now have a pretty good way of determining where I am at one time or another and have been using it for about 6 months.

My phone is a OnePlus 3 and as I said the app is fairly power hungry. Currently owntracks uses ~39% of my battery’s capacity based on 1 day 1 hour uptime. Although this seems fairly high I have accepted it as a fair compromise untill I can finish another GPS project I have in the works.

Here’s my experience of such a setup so far,

• Battery usage increased significantly to a point where some users may not find it acceptable.
• I had to turn off battery optimization and advanced battery optimization or else the app would stop.
• The app does not always capture my location all of the time, sometimes it may be a few hours before it reports a significant change despite being in move monitoring mode or significant changes mode.
• The performance and recording of positions in the app isn’t as good if the app does not have internet access all the time, so if data is switched off in my phone, the recording of the position isn’t as good as if it were on all the time, sometimes there can be large gaps where there was no internet access where it drops out.
• My use case was for later analysis of the data, not realtime.
• Owntracks recorder is not very featured but it does the job.