Bullet points taken from article:
- Google is shutting down the Google Maps Timeline feature on June 9, 2025.
- Personal Maps timelines will be saved on individual devices instead of the cloud beginning on that date.
- Users should begin the migration to on-device Timeline data before June or risk losing all of their past Maps data.
I’m pleased that this potentially sensitive information is moving on-device instead of on Google servers.
It’s great that this will be more private, but it’s shitty that there’s not an option to store it encrypted in the cloud. Most phone manufacturers (Google included) are still pretty chintzy with storage space, which is probably why they are limiting this to 90 days of history.
Edit: Actually, there is no hard 90-day limit. I misunderstood this part of the article:
Auto-deletion of data: Visits and routes older than three months will be automatically deleted unless users take specific action to save individual trips.
That “specific action” includes simply disabling auto-delete, or setting it to 18 or 36 months. It’s not something you need to do for every trip you want to retain beyond 90 days. Not sure how much storage this will take up long-term though.
You can! I went through the wizard they have in the app to do the conversion, and you have the option to store it forever as an encrypted cloud backup if you wish.
Thanks! Got your reply right after I submitted my edit. Ultimately I like this change.
I do wish that it were easier to manage storage at an OS level, though. It would be super cool if I could have any arbitrary app data stored securely off-device. Backups are one thing, but offloading is another. I foolishly bought a 128GB phone and I am perpetually at the limit. My kingdom for an SD slot! (Though I’m not sure if many apps can actually use SD cards these days.)
The SD card business is total BS. Vendors claim they did away with it because of performance and quality concerns, but there are some really nice and fast SD card standards out there. They should have taken the Playstation model – accept anything into the slot but test for acceptable performance.
I’m sure they’re doing this not for user privacy but simply because they’re going to save a lot of money in server expenses and they didn’t find a good way to monetize that data
I hate this so much!! I can now see what I did at any time back in 2012. And it’s going away? It’s so stupid! I want a choice to keep it is it was!
How do I back it up, if it lives just on my device? What happens when I switch phones?
