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Location tracking PWA for travellers who want to share their journey

A PWA that ingests OwnTracks location pings, stores them in Supabase, and gives travellers an interactive day-by-day view of everywhere they've been.

2026 · YearCreator1 monthsLive
Third Eye
third-eye.png
overview

What it is

Third Eye is a Progressive Web App for travellers who want to track their journey without friction and share their live location with trusted contacts. It receives location pings from OwnTracks via HTTP, persists them to Supabase in real time, and surfaces them in an interactive map UI with day-wise, week-wise, and custom date range views.

challenge

The hard part

Most location sharing apps are either invasive, battery-hungry, or locked into a walled garden. OwnTracks is a solid open-source tracker, but it has no built-in history or visualization layer. The goal was to build a clean interface on top of it — something a traveller could actually hand off to family and friends.

approach

How I thought about it

Built a Next.js API route to receive and store OwnTracks HTTP payloads directly into Supabase. The frontend reads from Supabase and renders location history as an interactive map with day, week, and custom range filters — so a traveller can replay any stretch of their trip at a glance. Packaged as a PWA so it installs on mobile with no App Store required.

stack

Tech

Next.js
Supabase
features

What it does well

OwnTracks integration

Receives location pings from OwnTracks via HTTP and stores them in Supabase in real time.

Interactive trip visualization

Day-wise, week-wise, and custom date range views — replay any stretch of a journey on an interactive map.

Live location sharing

Share a link and credentials with loved ones so they can follow along without needing the app.

PWA

Installs on mobile like a native app — no App Store, no friction.

lessons

What I took away

  • OwnTracks + a simple HTTP endpoint is all you need for solid passive location tracking.
  • A PWA shell removes the biggest barrier to adoption on mobile.