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2024 for Dawarich: a Year in Review

· 3 min read
Evgenii Burmakin
Evgenii Burmakin
Author of Dawarich

It's time for a monthly update on what happened to Dawarich, your favourite self-hosted alternative to Google Timeline, in December — but since it's December, I'd like to share an overview of what happened during this year in general, too.

All in all — what a year! With the very first experiments about a year ago, I started working on Dawarich in March this year and it soon became my main pet-project.

So, what do we have after ~10 months of development?

  • Existing data import and visualization. Google Takeout, Owntracks, GPX files, photos metadata, you name it.
  • Tracking location history. Again, Owntracks and Overland as primary tracking apps for Android and iOS, HomeAssistant integration (kudos to the community!), and more to come.
  • Stats. Total overview and splitted by years and months.
  • Trips, one of my favourite features. I just love being able to create a trip, add a note and have it looking so nice on the map and with all the photos pulled from my Immich instance.
  • Imports and exports, superimportant thing.
  • Basic administration: points and user management.
  • RESTful API.
  • Photos integration. In November and December I introduced Immich and Photoprism integrations to display photos right on your map.
  • Places and Visits. Not really usable right now, this feature is what I want to improve in the next year, making it a real replacement for Google Timeline in regards of "where I was and what I did back then".
  • Basic telemetry. Optional thing that may help me estimate user base to bring some light on how Dawarich is being used. No private user data is being collected.

I'm so happy to have this project and this beautiful community. Dawarich was received a lot better than I ever expected, and now counts 2700+ stars on Github, and with such a great start I think it might become something even bigger.

Small glimpse into what I want to focus on in 2025:

  • Improving Places and Visits
  • iOS app (I teamed up with an iOS developer, WIP)
  • Android app (WIP by a community member)
  • General application stability
  • General application performance
  • Hopefully, better UX
  • Support for more data formats and sources

If you have ideas of what feature might fit well into Dawarich, please let me know in the discussions.

Big thanks to you all, who expressed interest in the project after my initial post in the end of April, to people who were trying Dawarich in their own setups, asked questions, provided feedback, opened issues and even PRs on Github. Without all this support I doubt I'd spend so much time working on it, you're the best, folks.

Thank you, have great holidays and see you next year! 🎄

This post was originally published on r/selfhosted.

Dawarich is free, open-source and self-hostable. If you'd rather not run your own server, Dawarich Cloud does the hosting for you.