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Looking for selfhosted alternative to "Find my phone" (lemmy.zip)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hi, I'm looking for an alternative to Google's Find my phone that can be self hosted. Most important feature would be to see the last known location of a mobile phone without disclosing the location to any third party system. It would be nice to have features like making the phone ring or wiping the phone remotely.

Happy to hear any ideas what you people are using.

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[–] 46 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Little known feature on Home Assistant is the ability to have any phone who has home assistant installed to be able to use it as a trigger. So you can see things like battery left and gps location. I have an automations that will ping the last location of my family members when the phone hits 2% power so I can see their last location right before the phone dies.

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  • [–] 27 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    great idea, but a suggestion.

    instead of just one ping at 2%, do three within 10 seconds of each other. this would determine direction and rate of travel.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago* (1 child)

    You can just remotely enable high accuracy mode for a minute and it will trace their path on a map cleanly.

    _action: notify.mobile_app_your_fone metadata: {} data: message: device_high_accuracy_mode data: silent: true high_accuracy_mode: turn_on channel: loc __

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (1 child)

    wouldn't that either be disabled due to the low battery or eat up the remainder of the battery?

    I would think snapping coords, even at low accuracy, would be more power efficient since it technically doesn't have to connect to more satellites and requires less compute.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 hours ago

    If you have the mobile app installed, it's running GPS in the background anway. High accuracy mode just ups the frequency of checkin to your liking. Besides, you only need to have it on for a minute or so to determine vector. You probably already have it, but if there is any question, going high accuracy for a moment will answer it.

    I don't find that high accuracy does much to battery life as long as you're smart with it. There are may ways to configure it so it won't eat your battery.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    I use home assistant and have a dashboard button that triggers an automation.

    Using the notification action, I turn off do-not-disturb, turn off Bluetooth (so it doesn't pipe sound to earbuds or remote audio), set notification mode to on (not vibrate) and set the notification volume to max. I used to loop the default notification sound, but then switched so that the notification uses a new channel entirely and set each phone with a song so it will play for a while. You can silence it with the volume key.

    Took a little tinkering to get it right, but works really well.

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  • [–] -3 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    How do you ping a location update? I've tried sending the hidden sms that's supposed to do is but it only seems to work about 25% of the time, and I have to run the actual location check like 3-4 minutes later

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  • [–] 1 point 21 hours ago

    Don't use sms. Use the home assistant notify skill. It will notify my phone using the notify.notify skill.

    But if I'm going to do 3 pings for the direction of the pings, then I gotta figure out a different solution.

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