The timeline: a life journal, not a surveillance feed
This series has spent months on locks: envelopes, blind servers, keys and backups. Fair enough, but locks are only ever as interesting as what they protect. So this post is about the thing itself, the heart of the app: the timeline.
Most location apps answer one question: where is everyone right now? A dot on a map, refreshed forever, forgotten instantly. Fenzly answers a second question the dot can’t: what did my days actually look like? That second answer is the part we think you’ll still care about in ten years, and it’s exactly the part that must never live in anyone’s database but yours.
Your day, told in stays and trips
Raw GPS is unreadable: thousands of points, no meaning. The timeline turns them into a story, on your phone: left home at 8:02, twenty minutes by bike, school at 8:22, forty minutes at the market on the way back. Stays and trips, with times, durations and transport modes, assembled by the machinery we’ve described without you touching anything.
There’s one thing the phone can’t know: what a place is. A stop it has never seen shows up as bare coordinates until you name it, once. Pin, radius, a name, maybe a category, and from then on every future stop there is recognised. The app proposes your own nearby places first, then surrounding businesses, but the naming is yours. That’s deliberate: a journal written entirely by a machine belongs to the machine. This one is co-written.
A journal is only useful if you can read it
Accumulating days is easy; reading them is the feature. The History tab gives your journal three indexes.
Places ranks the spots of your life: visit counts, total time, the detail of every entry and exit. Categories groups them your way, Home, Work, Sport, Restaurant, or anything you invent, and answers questions like “how much time did I really spend at work this month?” (Categories are personal, by the way: they’re never shared, even for a place your circle knows.) Trips counts journeys and kilometres, filterable by trip category, which quietly solves a very grown-up problem: your professional kilometres for the month, one filter away.
All of it follows the period you pick, this week, this month, this year, as far back as your journal goes.
The quiet rule underneath
Everything above runs under one rule: the journal is computed on your phone, from your data only, and stays there. Your circle members’ stays live on their phones; the server holds nothing readable at all; the whole tab works without a network.
This is the place to recall what a location history reveals: religion, health, relationships, routine. A timeline is precisely that data, distilled and labelled. It’s telling that even Google, in 2024, moved its Maps Timeline off its own servers and onto users’ devices, an unusual retreat, and a quiet admission of what this data is. We never had to retreat: Fenzly’s timeline was born on your device, because the only database that can’t betray your life’s journal is the one that doesn’t exist.
You hold the eraser
A journal you can’t edit is a log someone keeps on you. So the pen and the eraser are both yours. A visit attributed to the wrong place (the cinema instead of the restaurant next door, GPS can’t tell inside a building) is corrected in two taps. Retention is a setting: keep everything, the default, or cap it at 24, 12 or 6 months, and what’s beyond the cap is permanently erased, from your phone, there’s no other copy to chase.
Storage is handled with the same frankness. Old trips are automatically slimmed after thirty days: the stats are frozen first, then the trace keeps only the points that matter to its shape, so an unlimited journal doesn’t eat your phone. You can switch that off if you want every point forever; the price is yours to choose, like everything else here.
The honest limits
The journal is only as good as the detection feeding it, and we’ve already told you where that machinery stumbles: trips that start a couple hundred metres late, the occasional mislabelled transport mode, a short hop missed entirely (one tap on “Locate me” patches it). A stop stays anonymous until you name it, that’s a chore, and we prefer it to the alternative, an app that guesses what every address means.
And the flip side of “it only exists on your phone” never goes away: no backup, no journal. Ten years of days deserve the two minutes that setting takes.
One question this post carefully avoided: who else gets to read which pages? That’s the other heart of Fenzly, the sharing modes of a circle, and it’s exactly where we go next.