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!
I just saw a new version of GeoPulse announced here https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1ukljop/geopulse_selfhosted_alternative_to_google/
Seems a bit like overkill given the “can’t be hard to use” requirement, but thought I’d share in case it’s useful anyway :)
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Git Popular version control system, primarily for code MQTT Message Queue Telemetry Transport point-to-point networking NAS Network-Attached Storage SSO Single Sign-On VPN Virtual Private Network XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (‘Jabber’) for open instant messaging
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
[Thread #15 for this comm, first seen 16th Jun 2026, 00:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I use Home Assistant for this. It works very well and the data is all local. It’s probably a bit heavy if you don’t use the other parts of home assistant though.
Do you know if it works well with GrapheneOS?
Does it use http or MQTT?
I was using Traccar and that worked well until moving to GOS and then background updates wouldn’t work.
I tried owntrack and nextcloud but never got it to work.
It uses http, and yes, it works perfectly on GrapheneOS.
Home Assistant location doesn’t quite play nice with GOS. My wife and I have been looking for a Life360 replacement ourselves. She runs Graphene, and it’ll grab location periodically, but it’s not consistent.
Do you use persistent connection? Both myself and my partner use GOS and it works fine, and updates frequently. You might also be able to change the pull rate as well.
I want to say I enabled it, but I’ll have to check again.
Does increasing the poll rate affect the battery usage much?
I think it could drain battery depending on what settings you tweak. However, I don’t have terrible battery drain. Here’s all of my settings that could be related:
With those settings, I get pretty frequent updates to my location. I do wonder about the call out that the update interval for locations is separate from others, I wonder if that applies?
So we took a look trying to figure out why her phone wasn’t giving HA a consistent location… She likes to turn off the camera/mic/location killswitches 😂
Quick fix haha, but at least we know that Graphene is doing the thing that it’s known to do!
