My Tracks

» see play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.maps.mytracks as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

my tracks belongs to the short period when google still wrote small single-purpose apps for its own phone platform and gave them flat descriptive names. it arrived on 12 february 2009, ran on android 1.5 and up, and did one job. it turned on the gps chip and wrote down where the phone went.

in 2009 that was not obvious. the gps radio had shown up in phones a year or two earlier and mostly sat there serving turn-by-turn directions to people in cars. my tracks was the argument that the chip was a sensor rather than a navigation feature, that a phone in your pocket was a logging device that happened to make calls. it showed distance and elevation while you moved, and it would read your progress out loud if you asked it to. you could drop a marker anywhere on the route.

the part that mattered came at the end. you could push the recording to a google spreadsheet or to google maps, and you could export it as kml or gpx and do whatever you liked with it. later versions played the track back inside google earth, which was a party trick, and read heart rate and cadence off bluetooth sensors, which was not. by september 2013 the play store counted somewhere between ten and fifty million installs against a rating of 4.4.

i have never been the person who logs a bike ride. i have been the person who wants the raw track off the device in a format nothing else has to bless, which is a different appetite entirely and the one this app was built by. an engineer wrote it, you can tell, and it stayed engineer-shaped for seven years while every competitor moved toward accounts and a monthly fee.

~ the dossier ~

~ the open years ~

on 28 march 2010 google open sourced the whole thing under apache 2.0. this was rare then and is close to unthinkable now for a consumer google app with tens of millions of installs. for four years anybody could read how it handled the gps stream, and a fair number of specialist tracking apps in that era were reading it.

then it stopped. the last open source release was 2.0.5 in august 2013 and development on the public repository closed the following year. the app kept shipping updates from behind the wall, with 2.0.11 going out on 21 january 2016, but by then the pattern was recognizable to anybody who has watched google products age. maintenance releases with no features are not a roadmap.

~ the day it died ~

the notice went up on 28 january 2016, one week after the final update. after 30 april, my tracks would no longer be available, and google apologized for the inconvenience this might cause. the reason given was the tough decision to invest its efforts into other and more wide-reaching mapping projects, which in practice meant google maps timeline, a feature that records where you have been without asking you to press anything and does not offer you the file.

users had until the end of april to export what they had. that was three months of notice for seven years of tracks, and the export path worked, which is more than several google shutdowns managed. the code did not die with the app. a fork called opentracks appeared on 19 september 2019, built from the last open version, still maintained, still handing you the file. it exists because of the one decision google made in 2010 and then quietly stopped making.

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