Hi there my dear people of r/selfhosted! Fresh bunch of Dawarich news is due, make yourself comfortable :) To whom it may concern, Dawarich — is your (is and always will be) a free open source self-hostable alternative to Google Timeline.

AI Disclosure (as per https://lemmy.world/post/49320548):

Implementation - Generated

Testing - Generated

Design - Generated

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Our links:

Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich

Website: https://dawarich.app/

iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dawarich/id6739544999

Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.dawarich.Dawarich

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Nine releases, what a month! And not a puny ones, this time we managed to speedrocket Dawarich performance in browser. If you have hundreds of thousands (or even millions!) of points and you'd love to see them all on the map, previously that would be not an easy task for Dawarich. It would crash your browser, as many times as you try loading the data. But no more! Our very own community member, the man behind the Docker image we're using to run Photon, Robin (https://github.com/rtuszik) suggested a fresh approach to loading points: just render them as map tiles! Together we brought this idea to life and now my own dataset consisting of 957,350 geo points gets loaded in less than 1 second! That's kinda insane to me, to be honest. And yeah, instead of ~590MB of JSON transferred to your browser, it took uhhh 150KB? Just don't forget to enable the toggle in the map settings.

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If you want to drag your points, do disable it though, seamless points editing will be added bit later. Oh, and tracks are being now served in the same manner, too. And routes, and fog of war layers. It's all a lot faster now! Dawarich now speaks 6 languages! German, Spanish, French, Polish and Catalan were added to the default English. Simplified Chinese is on the way, and feel free to suggest your own locales :) You can change it in Settings -> General

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Visit detection was rebuilt from scratch and it's finally useful. God knows I procrastinated this feature long enough, but now it's in a very good shape. Suggests real places I visited, and community members are also confirming it's not just me — for them it also yielded very relevant results. By the way, you'll no longer see the annoying "99+" counter of the visits on your timeline button. We all hated the feeling of an unfinished job but let's be real ain't nobody got time to click all the suggested visits. Now they are just there, without the irritating counter, sitting patiently, waiting for you to delete them or... just let them be. They are precise enough now, after all, so why not, right?

Deleting a visit also leaves an invisible tombstone now, so the visit won't be resuggested again. And the Timeline panel got much cleaner. I'm still not entirely satisfied with its state, so some changes are due, I want smoother UX.

By the way, one of former Dawarich user mentioned something like we're making the Timeline "less and less useful with each release", so here I'd like to use the opportunity and ask you guys, do you share same feeling? What's good about Timeline, what's not so good? I'd love it to be as useful and convenient as possible, so your feedback is very important. Thank you!

Transportation modes, also rebuilt. This one is a lot trickier and even Google itself fails to properly attribute the way a human being moved (suggesting driving over train ride for example), but it's still got significantly more reliable. I have some cool work ahead of me to make it even better, but that's a secret.

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Videos are finally here! God I love videos. The Video Studio first was released as a free tool on our website (https://dawarich.app/tools/route-video-maker/), and then I added it to Dawarich itself, which makes it easier to use your own routes to create a video.

Check it out!

And here's an actual video produced by Dawarich Video Studio: https://youtube.com/shorts/mEUe4RktKSg

Also, the "Share" button on the map page now also has a way for you to create and share a poster or a video. Your memories were never more material!

Rendering is being done in your browser, and it allowed me to not cram another backend service into the Dawarich stack, neat.

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Map v1 (Leaflet) is gone. I'm surprised nobody really complained about it. I'll take it as a sign that Maplibre version is a lot better!

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Geocoding settings are now available in Settings->Integrations, with selection of providers supported by Dawarich and appropriate settings available for them. The ENV vars are still there and take precedence over what's configured in the UI, so no breaking changes.

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Imports got smarter:

• Google Takeout & Polarsteps now extract visits, named places, tracks and the source app's tication — not just raw GPS points. Google's own place names (Home, Work…) are kept. Older imports: "Extract additional data" in the Imports list. "Remove extracted data" undoes it without touching your points.
• FIT files with developer data fields (Wahoo devices) now import instead of failing to parse
• Traccar KML exports now import LineString points instead of finishing with zero.
• Google Timeline: fixed altitude/accuracy/speed being silently dropped from rawSignals, and estamps no longer scramble path order.
• Imports finishing with zero saved points now tell you instead of completing silently.
• Tracks no longer stitch two different devices together (Records.json contains every device

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Tracks calculation got a lot smarter: fewer skims along the route, better anomaly points detection, better distinction between different devices tracking simultaneously, hence stats distance calculation now has better precision.

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Preparation work is being done for the Family feature coming to our mobile apps. We're currently testing it internally and are hoping to release it there soon. Also, OwnTracks' HTTP mode now can show your family members in the app: every upload is answered witveryone sharing with you.

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Database optimisation works are also in progress: most of the August releases are containing some changes to how Dawarich writes and serves your data, it may lead to bigger space consumption. In the end, when the process is done (hopefully before end of September), I'll provide an instruction on how to shrink your databases with no data loss. If you'd like to do it now — do the full vacuum to the points table. For the rest of you — please wait for the next post or keep an eye on our changelogs, it will be there.

⚠️ If you're upgrading from 1.10.x, do these once

• Restart the app after migrations have run — until then, deleting a visit looks like it worked without saving.
• Settings -> Visits -> re-detect (self-hosted does this fleet-wide automatically; SKIP_VISITS_FLEET_REDETECT=1 to opt out).
• Map settings -> Transportation Mode Detection → "Re-classify my history."
• Map v2 -> Settings -> "Recalculate tracks & stats" to apply the gap-distance fix to past months.
• Expect background backfills to run for a while on big histories. Progress is under Background jobs settings.

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Mobile app UI was updated! It now includes better navigation between days, you can select date range to show your data, and you can also replay your day on the map. We added new layers: points and heatmap, more to follow.

If you're hosting Dawarich behind cloudflared or similar gateway, you can now benefit from custom HTTP headers to connect your mobile app to your Dawarich instance.

We added Smart Tracking mode for Android and Continuous Tracking mode for iOS. Enable precise tracking mode to see the toggle. Both modes use motion-aware updates to toggle tracking on and off to save your battery life.

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Well, I guess, that's it for today?

And as always, our links one more time to save you a scroll:

Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich

Website: https://dawarich.app/

iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dawarich/id6739544999

Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.dawarich.Dawarich

Donate: https://www.patreon.com/freika / https://github.com/sponsors/Freika/

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P.S. 1st of October I'll be speaking at Berlin's Geomob event ( https://thegeomob.com/ ) come and say hi!

See y'all soon!

Hello there my good people of self-hosted Lemmy! Dawarich got some new stuff since my last post, so here I (Evgenii) am, ready to tell all about it! Make yourself comfortable and prepare for awesome stuff :)

By the way, Dawarich — is your free (now and forever) open source self-hostable alternative to Google Timeline. And hey — we just reached 10k stars on Github! Yay! Here's a small bonus for you! https://youtu.be/-7o2WJPXMVw

AI Disclosure (as per https://lemmy.world/post/49320548):

Implementation - Generated

Testing - Generated

Design - Generated

---

Our links:

Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich

Website: https://dawarich.app/

iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dawarich/id6739544999

Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.dawarich.Dawarich

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First of all, tons of bugs were fixed. Right now I'm steadily keeping number of open issues on Github at around a hundred, and, hopefully, I'll be able to significantly reduce it in the upcoming months. It's time for Dawarich to get some more stability.

So, let's start with the big things!

Since 1.9.1, the following changes were introduced:

• Poster Studio: you can now generate posters, wallpapers or images for your social media, featuring your location history on the map, in a beautifully styled way. Check out screenshot below.

• You can also order a printed poster via our print-on-demand integration, thus supporting Dawarich development. Print quality is superb: I personally ordered two posters to test it, pictures are also can be found below. Important: it's built with privacy in mind, so nothing gets sent to our print-on-demand provider unless you explicitly click a button. Prices are 44,99€ for 30x40cm, 54,99€ for 50x70cm and 74,99€ for 70x100cm poster, printed on 200 gsm premium matte paper. Delivery and VAT included, for now — EU only.

• As a side-effect of the Poster Studio introduction, you can now apply same styles to your main map and customize the colors or provide custom schema for vector maps. It's pretty fancy, check it out!

• Dawarich can be installed as PWA! Pretty neat for read-only purposes on mobile, and I have some ideas on how to make it look nicer on mobile screens in the future.

• Replay upgrades — Polaroid photo pile, live photo-layer toggling, recenter & follow camera

• Google Takeout & Polarsteps imports now extract visits, named places, tracks, and transport modes, not just points (1.11.0); retroactive via "Extract additional data" on the Import page TCX/FIT/Google-takeout activity types now feed transportation-mode detection

• File imports stopped storing raw_data copies; streaming batches for large GeoJSON/Timeline files. Less space on disk taken, less memory during import consumed. Existing points are re-checked after upgrade, with tracks/stats/digests rebuilt on the lowest-priority queue. If you're updating and noticing resources consumption surge, just let it work through the background jobs.

• Self-hosted stack ~20% lighter: 452 → 325 MB app container, 843 → 690 MB total. I also have some more ideas on how to make it even slimmer later

• GET /api/v1/points endpoint now works up to 5 times faster than before

• ImageMagick removed from the image, making the docker image smaller

• Oh, and mobile app update was released, for now just for Android, iOS is following in a few days: you can now enable/disable points, routes, heatmap and visits layers, easily navigate between days and replay your daily movements. The iOS version will also include an (for now, optional) experimental tracking mode, that shown pretty good results, but it needs the famous blue arrow to be on all the time. The choice is yours. Oh, and Dawarich for mobile now eats a lot less of your phone battery. Thanks for all the detailed reports.

These are the most notable changes, but under the hood, there is a lot more. If you're interested, check our our Releases page ( https://github.com/Freika/dawarich/releases ), it's all there.

And now, that we're done with what's already there, let's talk a bit about the future.

Dawarich started as a tool to show location history on the map, but it became so much more since then (all thanks to you, by the way). In the nearest future, subjects of our primary focus are:

• Better mobile experience: UI, more feature parity with the web, better onboarding and family features
• Reworked Search UI
• Simpler and more concise UI overall across the app (I heard Timeline is not that easy to work with)
• Geofence (tell me about your use-cases!)
• Less bugs
• Two new locales (German & French, web first, mobile will follow)
• Better performance and architecture improvements
• I also want to play around MCP so your LLMs of choice could easily talk to Dawarich, improve visits detection and transportation mode detection, but the last two will take some work.

So yeah. As usual, lots of work behind us, even more is ahead of us. I want to say thank once again to all of you who are using Dawarich on daily basis, reporting bugs, suggesting features, opening PRs with fixes and new features supports us financially or just spread the word about the work we do. Without you guys there would be no Dawarich, so — thank y'all.

We also highly appreciate your donations, every single one makes a difference, whether it's a 1 time 1 euro donation or a recurring one on Patreon paid in full for the next year. Every single one of them brings us one step closer to a point where Konstantin (who is in charge of our mobile apps) and I will be able to spend more time polishing Dawarich.

If you happened to be (or know someone who is) a Youtube blogger, a podcaster or just have a blog, we'll be happy to talk to you in case you'd like to create something featuring Dawarich (or Dawarich Atlas for that matter, I'll be giving a talk on it on October's Berlin Geomob). So ping me!

As always, our links to save you a scroll:

Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich

Website: https://dawarich.app/

iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dawarich/id6739544999

Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.dawarich.Dawarich

Donate: https://www.patreon.com/freika / https://github.com/sponsors/Freika/

Thanks and see y'all in a ~month!

P.S. Cooking something legendary

Hey, it's been a minute! Dawarich is your favorite FOSS selfhostable alternative to Google Timeline, remember? We've shipped a lot since the last post and I'm here to tell you all about it.

Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich

Website: https://dawarich.app/

First, a picture to get your attention:

Before we start with the great stuff, let me talk a bit about good stuff as well. Release 1.8.0 introduced a new mechanism to let you know about new releases. It works through my new application called Chibichange (https://chibichange.com/).

TL;DR: there is a Chibichange widget shipped in Dawarich, which, if you consent, will ping chibichange.com to check if there are new updates for your Dawarich instance. If there is a new version, a green pulsing dot will be shown in Dawarich navbar, click on it, and you'll see what's changed in Dawarich since your current version. Feature suggestion and voting coming to chibichange soon.

Important: this is an opt-in feature, no external requests will be made if you click "No thanks". If you say "no", there will be the usual exclamation mark beside the version if there is a new release on Github, but, sadly, no in-app changelogs.

A bit more context: I built Chibichange to have a way to conveniently deliver changelogs to Dawarich users, and soon it'll also allow you to suggest features, vote them up and provide feedback. Suggested features, if we decide to build them, will be added to our public roadmap. By the way, we recently added a roadmap: https://dawarich.app/roadmap/. Will update it soon with more cool stuff we've planned.

Chibichange will be open-sourced this summer and will have same model as Dawarich: FOSS self-hostable software with an optional cloud service for those who don't want to self-host it. This is a very niche tool, but I hope it will be useful to those in similar position, building self-hostable or otherwise software.

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Okay, let's get back to Dawarich news.

The big one this time: we now draw your flights on the map. If you self-host AirTrail, Dawarich can pull your flight history and render it as proper arcs on Map V2. Set it up on the Integrations page, hit "Sync now", and it re-syncs daily on its own. Finally your map knows you didn't teleport across the ocean.

There will be more for flights in the future.

Trips got a full redesign. The whole trip page is now built on MapLibre V2 — a sticky map on the left, and a scrollable day-by-day accordion on the right with per-day distance and times, day-colored routes, a photo overlay toggle, and a replay scrubber to play the trip back. You can also drop a short note on any individual day of a trip now. I'm really happy with how this one came out.

Public sharing is a whole new thing. Trips, tracks, live location and selected time ranges can now be shared via a public, optionally phrase-protected link. Public trip pages look pretty much the same as the in-app ones, with toggles to pick exactly what the page exposes — route, stats, countries, day-by-day, notes, photos, whatever you want.

Here's a public link to my Norway road trip from the screenshot above: https://my.dawarich.app/s/07024d88-0c43-4554-ad89-d7f2916b7d57

Visit detection got rewritten. There's a new opt-in stay-point detector — non-ML, single pass, and it gives each suggested visit a 0–100 confidence score. It fixes the old algorithm's biggest annoyances: missing slow stays, and splitting one visit in two when your phone's battery died for a bit. It's behind a flag for now while I gather feedback, but it'll become the default soon. You can also now label a visit by searching for the real place name right in the Timeline.

What else?

• Multi-device tracks no longer get mangled — if you track from a phone and a watch and a GPS unit, each device stays on its own track instead of becoming one zigzagging mess.
• Fog of War can now reveal per-hexagon, not just per-point.
• Globe view is now on by default.
• Big import improvements: GPX files now stream instead of loading entirely into memory (no more OOM on huge exports), Garmin FIT files are supported, Google's "Timeline Edits.json" Takeout is recognized, and the official Traccar client is now supported directly.
• Fixed Immich photo timestamps that could be off by up to 24 hours, monthly stats now bucket by your local timezone, and a pile of timezone/DST crashes are gone.
• You can now run the containers as a custom user via PUID/PGID, OIDC fixes (trailing slash + PKCE), and a 2FA lockout to keep accounts safe.
• And, as always, literally a TON of other fixes. Bugs too, sorry, one can't go without the other.

Gentle reminder: Map V1 (Leaflet) is being sunsetted this August. Everything new is being written for V2, and it's better in basically every way — but if there's something from V1 you'd miss, tell me and I'll figure it out. Vector maps are the future!

Also, a glimpse into the future, I found an awesome tool to generate maps, bent it in couple places to work with Dawarich, and poster generation will be a thing soon!

I was so excited about how well it worked out, that I even researched if it'd be possible to plug an "Order" button into Dawarich, and, well, yes. Probably not gonna automate it right away, will just add the "Order" button beside the "Download" one for created posters, and will see how it goes. Anyway, it could be a good to support the development for anyone willing to do so, while getting a very nice personalized thingy you can actually hang on your wall. Man I love these posters.

We've finally released an update for our mobile apps, with the new logo, bug fixes and a registration flow that will have no use to selfhosters, but still is important thing to have. Annoying bug with the map not being rendered in dark mode is fixed, yay. Also, we had to re-list our Android app in Google Play Store, so the update will require you to download it separately and reauthenticate. Make sure you've uploaded all the data you had not yet uploaded in the old app. New app's page: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.dawarich.Dawarich

We'll still release a small update for the old one with a banner suggesting an update. Sorry for this inconvenience.

This mobile release took a lot of efforts and tons of testing, but it opens new possibilities for us, and in the next one we want to focus on battery consumption optimization and, finally, will start making more steps towards feature parity with the web app.

I guess that would be it for today! I actually wanted to write a post every month, but, well, it's also too good to post one every other month :)

Saving you a scroll:

Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich

Website: https://dawarich.app/

iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dawarich/id6739544999

Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.dawarich.Dawarich

Donate: https://www.patreon.com/freika / https://github.com/sponsors/Freika/

P.S. I got my shit together and started tinkering on another app, which, once done and production ready, will open lots of new possibilities for Dawarich, check it out: https://atlas.dawarich.app/. It's basically self-hostable offline maps for homelabbers, built on shoulders of titans: Overpass, Photon, Valhalla and some other great mapping tools, under a single UI and API. I'll create a separate post here once it's mature enough. Map matching comes to Dawarich, baby!

P.P.S If you're in Berlin, I'll be doing a presentation on Dawarich on Geomob, a mapping meetup, 1st of October. Come say hi, I may have stickers for you by then!

Hello there, good people of lemmy world! It was my mistake to never post Dawarich updates here before and I'm here to fix it! I hope you'll find it interesting and useful.

In case you don't know what Dawarich is, it's your favorite free open-source self-hostable alternative to Google Timeline and your memory's best friend.

Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich

Website: https://dawarich.app/

Oh well, what a journey. It all started as a simple CRUD app with an endpoint to accept data from the Owntracks app for iOS. The first versions didn't even have authentication! Why bother, thought I, if I'm the only user. And look at us now.

What do we have now

So, let's have a look at our current set of features, shall we?

As of today, we have:

• Location tracking
  • Via Dawarich for iOS and Android (yeah we have the Android app now!)
  • Via GPSLogger, Overland, OwnTracks, Homeassistant, PhoneTrack, Colota and whatnot
• Location visualization
  • On a flat surface or on a globe
  • As points, routes, heatmap, fog of war
  • As extra layers, such as scratch map
• Visits, areas and places
  • Can be created manually or detected and suggested automatically
  • Tags for places, including privacy settings (hide my location history in X meters around a place that have a tag with privacy settings assigned)
• Family
  • With full privacy and location sharing only on consent
• Map tools
  • Places, visits and areas creation
  • Area selection tool (to show visits and manage points in selected area)
  • Transportation modes
  • Replay tool (oh I love it, gonna tell a bit more about it below)
  • Map search: enter place name or address to see when you visited it
• Trips
  • Utilizing photos integration to show photos along the trip route
• Stats
  • Total distance, points, countries and cities
  • Per-year and per-month distance traveled charts
• Insights
  • Per-year distance traveled
  • Traveling heatmap
  • Countries and cities visited
  • Days traveled
  • Year-to-year comparison
  • Monthly insights
  • Activity breakdown (stationary vs driving vs walking etc.)
  • Top visited locations
  • "When do you travel" patterns
• Imports and exports
  • Almost a dozen of supported file formats to import
  • Export to GPX, GeoJSON and full user account export

Huh, that's pretty much it, right? I mean, what a progress. All thanks to you and your support guys.

The Android app release

At the beginning of this year we've finally released our own Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zeitflow.dawarich

It's, of course, still rough around the edges, but I see it as a huge win and an opportunity to do more exciting stuff on the mobiles. The main focus, of course, is the tracking quality, and I think with the most recent release we got there and it works pretty stable now, but what do I know, I only yesterday ordered an android phone for internal tests! :D But seriously, please do share your feedback, it's crucial for the quality of our apps. Once again — thank you.

By the way, we also have an unofficial android app built by sunstep, a member of Dawarich community: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sunstep.dawarich. Check it out as well, he put tremendous amount of work into it. The mobile shift

We're working on moving the iOS app to the same codebase, as the Android one, so they would effectively share the same UI layer, while keeping native location tracking mechanisms for both platform under the hood. This means that the iOS app will rather soon be updated and both apps will have a green light to receive new features.

This is important, because we want our apps to able to do more. Dawarich started with the idea to bring convenience of the big screen back when Google killed the web-based Timeline, but hey, it's 2026 and people are running around with phones in their pockets for what, 15 years now? Or more, I didn't check that, but the idea is that web is awesome, but it's also very convenient to be able to quickly check your data on your smaller screen while commuting or otherwise not having access to the bigger screen. That's why we want to bring more viewing functionality to our apps. Trips, stats, insights (they are already there in the Android app by the way) and more.

And, just to make it clear: all 3rd party mobile clients currently supported will be also supported in the future. We have no plans enforcing our users to switch to our official apps. The choice belongs to you. The Replay

Remember I mentioned a replay tool in the feature list? Well, check this out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XiG5Kcevr4

sounds of excitement

I initially called it "Timeline" but the actual Timeline was introduced a few days later, so I renamed it to what it is — the Replay button. Love it.

Supporters Badge

More than a hundred people (I think the number is now closer to two hundreds) supported and keep supporting us financially during these two years, and as a small token of appreciation, we'd like to offer a nice shiny Supported Badge that will be shown in your Dawarich UI, see the screenshot.

It's an optional thing, that can be enabled in Settings -> General -> Supporter Status form. Just enter the email you used to sign in on a platform you supported us through (GitHub Sponsors / Ko-Fi / Patreon), and if it's in our supporters list, you'll receive this nice shiny badge. It can be disabled though, in case you don't like it. No pressure.

The webhooks from GitHub are currently a bit broken, so if you donated via Github Sponsors and verification didn't work for you, feel free to reach me directly and I'll add you to the supporters list manually.

What's next

We already have some new features in progress, so more good stuff is coming. One particular thing I'm super excited about, but I'll keep it a secret for now. Just wanted to heat up the excitement a bit :D

Aside from the plans for mobile, I'm working on improvements for trips, visits & places (which are begging for an UI/UX rework) and some stuff will be introduced in order to reduce the database sizes of your self-hosted instances. Keep an eye on the releases, it's all there.

You, the people

Once again, I want to say thank you to all of you: for reading my posts, for installing Dawarich and trying it out, for providing feedback, for creating issues with thorough bug reports on GitHub, for testing our Android app during the beta period, for being part of our Discord community. Thank you to all of our contributors: we have a few PRs with meaningful contributions opened and some already merged, one of them reduced time of our docker images build from ~70 mins to roughly 25 mins. We have a lot of low-hanging fruits waiting to be fixed in our code, simply because I don't always have time to address all the known issues. Don't hesitate to dive in and open a PR if you feel like you can improve something in Dawarich.

To save you a scroll, as always, the links one more time:

Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich

Website: https://dawarich.app/

The work continues, and there will be more, better and faster.

~ Evgenii from Dawarich---