Over the past few days I've been testing out an app that I've always wanted and even thought about creating myself. I've always loved tracking my location over time but had been unable to find a good method of doing so. For a while I used Foursquare but never liked the public nature of the check-ins and my circle of friends never really got into it making its social features useless.

What I've wanted is essentially Foursquare but private so that I could just track my own location history in private. I've thought about creating app to serve this need many times but just couldn't find the time to make it happen. A few days ago I did a search to see if any new apps have been made in the recent months that fit my needed criteria and I came across a possible solution. Turns out a few months ago an app, Geolicious by Daniel Bleisteiner came out and it is extremely close to what I had wanted to create all along.

Disclaimer: I haven't been paid to promote this app at all. This is 100% just a personal review of an app I've been wanting for a long time. I'm happy to pay for someone else to make something much better than I could pull off myself.

It allows you to check in to locations with all data kept local to the device and private unless you decide to share certain check-ins back to social services like Foursquare or Twitter. This is exactly what I had been using Foursquare for but now I have the ability to put in more private locations like friends and family homes. I would never have been able to do that on a public service like Foursquare. Geolicious even helps out by using Foursquare locations for the check-ins resulting in a data rich check-ins for existing venues. You can also quickly create custom location for your personal places that wouldn't be available on Foursquare.

Other applications like Ohai, built on top of App.net, were promising but in the end were more focused on journalling instead of just location tracking as I had wanted. It was also never clear whether custom locations added would be public or not as they were synced back to your App.net account and thus could potentially be access by other App.net apps.

Do you know where your data is?

Geolicious keeps all data stored locally on the device with export options using the GPX format. This gives the safety and peace of mind that your location data isn't being controlled by a third party while at the same time giving you flexibility to work with other programs or move your data elsewhere if desired.

Nice map implementation

So far I've been very happy with the overall UI of the app. It's clear and concise what location you're currently checked in to and the counter within the map pins are a great solution to show how many times you've checked in to a location without having to drill down to a specific location.

Aside from my lack of a data package while travelling last summer, Geolicious would have been perfect for my trip to Poland. It would have been a great method of tracking all the various places visited. In a world where everything is social, it's nice to track some stuff just for yourself. Geolicious finally allows me to track my location history in a way I've wanted for the past few years.

If you want to track your location history but don't want to share it publicly with your social network, check out Geolicious. It's currently only $0.99 in the app store which is a pretty low cost of entry. There's even a Geolicious Free version which limits you to 10 entries. This gives you a no risk way of trying it out before buying. With the Geolicious Free app in mind, I'm surprised the full application isn't a bit more. I would have been happy to pay $2.99 and up for the full blown app as it does exactly what I've been looking for.

Do you track your location history? If so, let me know how and what applications you've found useful in the comments below. I'd love to hear how others have tackled this.