Back in December, Google announced that Maps Location History would soon be stored on your phone instead of the cloud. This change to the Google Maps Timeline is continuing to roll out, and will see the deprecation of Your Timeline on the web.
When that location data was stored in Google’s servers, it was subject to broad geofence warrants that allowed law enforcement to request all information about devices near a particular incident. With this change, Google no longer has the ability to respond to those requests.
As part of this change, Location History is now called “Timeline.” That information has long been used by the popular “Your Timeline” feature that shows where you’ve been, including the specific locations you might have visited. This data is grouped into Trips, Places, Cities, and World (countries), while Google also generates Insights, like how far you traveled on a particular mode of transport.
The Your Timeline feature will continue to work in Google Maps for Android and iOS. However, this new on-device storage model means “Timeline for Web Maps will be going away.”
Since the data shown on your Timeline comes directly from your device, Timeline won’t be available on Maps on your computer after your data is moved to your phone
Top comment by makapav
To the editor: Please write some article and highlight how horrible UI and UX managing, viewing and editing the Google Maps Timeline on a mobile device is? If you don't know, get a device with a decent amount of Timeline data and see how painstakingly cumbersome every step is. It lags like no tomorrow and every step or change needs a update on the screen gifting with a blank rotating screen for 5-6 seconds. An overall edit with changes on multiple dates is 15-20 times longer than Timeline on web.
There is no way to undo a fat-finger error during editing - which is VERY easy on how jumpy the whole edit menu system is.
What's next - move email to mobile only for 'privacy'? These are exactly the boneheaded decisions that make you lose customer and open the door for a competitor to come in. Not to mention lose waning trust in the company.
Some people are quite upset about the loss of google.com/maps/timeline, which hasn’t been visually updated in ages, as they used the web UI heavily.
You will receive an email and app notifications once this change is available on your account. Google has been slowly rolling it out in recent months and it’s still not yet widely available. The company warns how:
If you don’t update your settings by the deadline in the emails and notifications you receive, you may lose some or all of your Timeline data, like your visits and routes.
Once enabled, you will have the option to “automatically back up your Timeline if you need to switch devices.” This involves an end-to-end encrypted copy of your data being stored on Google’s servers that only you can access.
From there, you can “move an existing backup to a different device or import your Timeline on a new device.”
More on Google Maps:
- New York City is using Google Maps to help you find a public bathroom
- Google Business Messages in Maps and Search shutting down
- Simplified Google Maps bottom bar rolling out on Android
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