Now that NextCloud is set up and running on my home server, it was time to start replacing my go-to apps and services that I was running before. One handy service that I was running on the old server setup was ulogger. ulogger is a great server with an excellent Android app that allowed you to log your phone position, make tracks, and catalog outdoor or road bound adventures. However, the goal of switching to NextCloud was getting everything cohesively working together with one sign in and all the data in one place, so I switch on the phonetrack app.

Installation was a breeze, as I only had to log into NextCloud’s admin gui and select apps. A quick search brought up phonetrack, and clicking enable was the only thing I had to do for it to be added to my NextCloud setup. In a few minutes on F-Droid, I was able to download the phonetrack Android app, and with shared credentials, I was up and running in less than 15 minutes from start to finish. I think this is the power of using NextCloud on your home server.

All was well and good, at least for uploading my tracks and seeing them on my NextCloud user’s accounts. I did run into one snag though. When I went to share a track with a friend, they just got a page with a “shared track” that had no map or points. This obviously doesn’t help much.

With a little research, I found that other users were having this issue as well. Fortunately, Valdnet had a solution, and with a quick edit of two files, I too had everything straightened out. This only applies to version 0.6.5, so hopefully future versions will not have this issue. But, I thought I’d share in case anyone else ran into this problem.

I really like phonetrack because of the integration and the option to share a specific track with someone, even someone who does not have an account on your server. ulogger also allowed you to share tracks, but you had to make it public to everyone, and all your tracks were either public or all were private, which was a bit of a problem. I did enjoy using ulogger for a long time and I appreciate all the work that was put into that server/app combination, but phonetrack works much better in this regard, so I’m glad I made the switch.

Linux – keep it simple.

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