Free / License Android tracking and battery status apps

Which android app do you use for battery charging status and location tracker without mobile phone battery draining?
Let me know if you use another.

  • Zanzito
  • OwnTracks
  • GPSLogger
  • life360
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0 voters

Google Maps Location Sharing.
I’m not installing additional apps just so that my house knows I’m there when Google knows where I am every minute of every day anyway…

I prefere Tasker.

Google maps, been using it for years to share locations with my family. Doesn’t seem to have any untoward issues on the phone. And as Coedy says, they know where you are anyway.

@eggman, @Coedy google map and google sharing can’t show battery status.

I use Automate for Android (similar to Tasker).

Yes it can.

I’m using google maps location sharing and it shows both the battery level, as well as if it’s charging or not.

See the photo below for all the attributes for google maps location sharing as a device tracker:

I use Automate for several things (Tasker too), but do you have an overview of your Automate flo?

Yes it can. See @Silicon_Avatar reply above.
You can simply template it out to become it’s own sensor.

Yeah, I can definitely anonymize and post my flows. I currently have flows for the following:

  • Presence detection: Using a combination of GPS and Wi-Fi I can reliably tell when we’ve left the house in ~30 seconds.
  • Bedtime: My wife and I each have an NFC tag on our nightstands. When those both get scanned, the lights turn off in the house and “night mode” is activated. It also turns white noise on on our bedroom Google Home.
  • Good Morning: Turns on certain lights in the house and gently wakes me up by brightening my bedside lamp when my alarm goes off.
  • Car Mode: Activated by NFC tag in my car. Most of the heavy lifting this one does is around turning on bluetooth and automatically playing music in the car, but there are some integrations around time and location that will either notify my wife when I get to work or let her know when I’m leaving work (with an ETA generated by Waze).

Some of these involve AppDaemon doing a lot of the work, with Automate just serving as the trigger. But I’ll work on cleaning these up for public consumption and getting them posted with more detail around them.

1 Like

This is gold.

I’d like to do some testing with this. So far, I haven’t been able to get just Tasker to work for this. Not sure what I’m missing but it’s not creating the tracker.

Probably off topic. I’ll keep an eye out for your flows. Thanks.

@eggman, @Coedy Thanks for confirmation.
I tried to add Google map in polling but can’t add. Maybe only admin can edit.

@smile, is there not a pencil icon down by the word Reply just at the bottom of your first post? I’m pretty sure you can edit your own posts, unless the Poll feature prevents it in this case

@artmg yes there is a edit option but can’t edit poll after 5 minutes

Google maps looks nice, but it requires that the application is not closed and GPS is enabled, otherwise it does not send updates. Has anybody measured what is the battery consumption per day (say in %) to keep it running in the background?

I leave my GPS on all the time and never kill any apps and I only get 1% of maps usage on a full charge (unless I actually use maps for navigating).
That was the case for an original pixel and more recently pixel 3.
(Both phones known for their pretty poor battery life due to small batteries)

HUH?

I guess you’re on an iPhone? Because on all the Android devices in my house (7-8 of them), Maps most certainly does NOT have to be open.

I actually never really looked at the battery usage of my device tracker (using OwnTracks on my Oneplus 3, so a bit of an oldy… and the battery itself is also slightly getting worse)…

Note that I hardly use any power-heavy applications (almost no games or media playing stuff etc). OwnTracks is the nr 1 power eater on my phone though.

You must have something enabled that you don’t need and is causing the app to do lots more than it needs to. My owntracks doesn’t even register in the battery usage page as its below 1%

We use it on iPhones and android, neither require the app to be running.

You can set permissions so it can’t get location unless it’s open but that’s a choice.