Free Safety Tracking App

[Shaunus]

Hi All

I wrote an app for my adventures, mainly flying hiking and cycling that allows my family to track my progress. I found that apps like Whatsapp are not that useful in helping locate you in the case that you get mugged or your phone dies, as it does not leave a breadcrumb trail. There are quite a number of flying schools and riding groups now using it, so give it a go if you want a simple way to be tracked. Your follower does not need the app, you share your track via a secure URL link.

View: www.safelytrack.me

Cheers

Shaun (Cape Town)

[Brakepad]

will try it next week, sounds good

[Jakkals.]

cool...will give it a go

[The Ouzo]

have donwloaded and will give it a go.

Initial impressions are that its another thing to remember to start before setting off on a ride. Is there anyway you can connect it to a device or something so that when you hit start on your garmin it starts on the app ?

 

Question 2

Have you done any long term testing regarding battery usage ? 

[burger 555]

My family uses Life360, there is a free version which works good enough. Shows your location and battery level, no need to start it as it is always on. You can set your work and home points which then sends other users notifications, detects when your driving and speed and on so on. Worth a look at

[Shaunus]

Morning. Ya alas you do need to manually start as you do need to decide who you want to share the track with i.e. do yo share with your partner via email, family whatsapp group etc. Maybe in the future for sure if that integration is possible. Then in terms of battery use, all the testing seems to show that the GPS uses between 2% and 10% on your battery per hour depending on your phone model. So a fully charged phone should get 10-50 hours with it continuously running in the background and uploading your position to the server. My S21 uses around 10% of its battery for a 4 hour ride.

Please send feedback as you use it, awesome.

[Shaunus]

20 minutes ago, burger 555 said:

My family uses Life360, there is a free version which works good enough. Shows your location and battery level, no need to start it as it is always on. You can set your work and home points which then sends other users notifications, detects when your driving and speed and on so on. Worth a look at

Life360 is a great family app but quite different functionality goals then what I was looking for. The main reason I wrote this versus using Life360 is I wanted to share my real time track with people without them having to have an app installed on their phone. I also did not want it continuously tracking in the background when I wasn't doing an activity, and I wanted the app to show my route with stats like most activity trackers do. It was also missing a terrain layer which I like to use.

Also remember to to turn off the Personal Information Sales, it defaults to on which allows them to sell your personal information and locations to third parties -> goto Settings -> Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information.

But for all day long family tracking, its the most popular app out there.

[Pieter-za]

5 hours ago, burger 555 said:

My family uses Life360, there is a free version which works good enough. Shows your location and battery level, no need to start it as it is always on

What I found with Life360 is that it does not track anymore when you put your phone into battery saving mode (?) whereas Garmin's Livetrack will still function.   (Maybe there is a setting for it but not important for me to use L360 in this regard, so I haven't checked)

It (GC) also has an 'auto start' capability, and can track you against a pre-defined course if required.

Edited February 16, 2023 by Pieter-za

[WaynejG]

Downloaded it and will try it over the weekend. Any chance the app will be available on a wearable device?

[Dusty]

On 2/13/2023 at 9:50 PM, Shaunus said:

Hi All

I wrote an app for my adventures, mainly flying hiking and cycling that allows my family to track my progress. I found that apps like Whatsapp are not that useful in helping locate you in the case that you get mugged or your phone dies, as it does not leave a breadcrumb trail. There are quite a number of flying schools and riding groups now using it, so give it a go if you want a simple way to be tracked. Your follower does not need the app, you share your track via a secure URL link.

View: www.safelytrack.me

Cheers

Shaun (Cape Town)

@Shaunus This works really well. Thank you.

[Shaunus]

Hi all. A new update has been uploaded to the store, version 1.5.3. Thanks for all the messages, there has been quite a nice uptake in riders using the app.

 

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.wis.safelytrackme

Apple: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/safely-track-me/id6444079423

Happy riding

Shaun