3 posts tagged with "Guides"

So you've exported your Google Timeline data. Maybe you heard about the shutdown and panic-downloaded everything. Maybe you just wanted to see what Google knows about you. Either way, you now have a ZIP file sitting on your desktop, and you're staring at a bunch of JSON thinking "what am I looking at?"

I maintain Dawarich, which imports all of these formats, so I've spent more time than I'd like reading Google's location JSON. Here's everything I know about what's inside your export — every field, every quirk, every format Google has shipped over the years.

Google Timeline is, for most practical purposes, dead. The web version is gone, the data lives on your phone now, and people are still discovering that years of their location history vanished in the transition. If you're reading this, you probably already know all that.

So what are the actual options in 2026? I went through the most popular alternatives, ranked them by how well they replace what Google Timeline used to do, and tried to be honest about the trade-offs — including the ones that apply to my own project.

What's going on?​

As you probably already know, Google discontinuing the web version of its Location History / Timeline service by December 1st, 2024. Here are some dry facts:

• Starting December 1st, 2024, the web version of Timeline will no longer be working
• Timeline data will now be stored on the user's device instead
• Users’ last 90 days of location data will be transferred to the first device they sign in with after December 1, but any data older than this will be deleted unless saved
• Users can manually backup Timeline data to Google’s servers for device restoration, but it will not be the default

The transition offered by Google is far from perfect: some users already have reported they have lost years and years of their location history data.

The least you can do is to export your data from Google. You can do it either using Google's Takeout feature or by navigating to Timeline -> Backup in your Google Maps application. Either way, in the end, you will receive an archive with your location history, hopefully, for the whole time you have been tracking it.