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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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[-] jaschen306@sh.itjust.works 48 points 3 days ago

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.

[-] blargh513@sh.itjust.works 8 points 3 days ago

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.

[-] irmadlad@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago

Well that's pretty cool. So when You ping, does it save this data or do you have to actually be present for the ping (on your phone)?

[-] Kirk@startrek.website 2 points 3 days ago

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

[-] jaschen306@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days 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.

this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2026
193 points (100.0% liked)

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