Practical

Your location history came back empty — here is why

August 21, 2026 847 words

You downloaded the file, opened it, and there is almost nothing there. This is hardly ever a bug — a setting is off, and finding out which takes five minutes.

This post exists because of an email. Someone had downloaded their file, handed it to the app, and got “not enough points”. They assumed the file was corrupt. It was not — battery saving had been putting Google Maps to sleep on their phone for eight months.

That kind of thing is more common than you would think. Here are the causes, in order, starting with the most frequent.

1. Auto-delete is on, and short

This is the most common cause and most people do not know the setting exists. Timeline has an auto-delete window: three months, eighteen months or thirty-six. On some accounts it arrives set to three.

If yours is on three months, last summer’s trip is already gone. Your file holds nothing older than ninety days, and that cannot be recovered. Extending the setting protects everything from here on, but it does not bring anything back.

Where: on Android, Settings → Location → Location services → Timeline. On iPhone, Google Maps → profile → Your Timeline. It is the first thing to check before a long trip.

2. Battery saving is silencing the recorder

This was the cause in that email, and it is the sneakiest one, because every setting looks correct while no data arrives.

Aggressive battery saving puts Google Maps to sleep in the background, and a sleeping app does not sample location. The result is a history that looks blank for weeks and then fills in suddenly when you happen to open Maps.

On Android, Settings → Apps → Google Maps → Battery, set to unrestricted. Some manufacturers — Xiaomi, Samsung and Huawei especially — also keep their own “autostart” lists, and Maps has to be allowed there too. That second list is very easy to miss.

3. Location permission is “while using the app”

At that level Maps only sees your location when the screen is open. Nothing is recorded while the phone is in your pocket, which leaves most of the day blank.

Timeline needs the permission set to “always” to work properly. On iPhone: Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Google Maps. On Android it is in the app info screen.

4. Timeline was never switched on

Granting location permission and enabling Timeline are not the same thing. Maps can use your location for directions and keep no history at all. Timeline is a separate switch and it is off by default.

If you have just turned it on, wait a few days. It takes Google a little while to turn the raw signals it collects into journeys; until then there may be no readable route in the file.

5. There is no data in the range you picked

When a tool says “not enough points”, the problem is often the selection rather than the file. You picked one month, and that month you did not travel — or the phone was broken.

The quick way to check is to widen the range to the whole file. The Wanderlapse settings screen has a bar per month, each as tall as the distance you covered in it. Empty months are obvious at a glance, and so are the full ones. Dragging across just the full stretch usually ends the problem.

Telling whether the file really is empty

Size is a good signal. A few kilobytes means almost nothing was recorded. Twenty to three hundred kilobytes is a few weeks. Three hundred kilobytes to three megabytes is a healthy year, more than enough to draw a route. Bigger than that and you either have several years, or a large section of raw signals that will not help you.

If the file is big and tools still find nothing, open it in a text editor and search for timelinePath. That answers it in seconds. If the word never appears, the journey structure has not been built yet.

Can any of it be recovered?

Honestly, no. History that was deleted, or never recorded, does not come back. Google does not hold it either, because the data lives on the device. One exception: years from 2023 and earlier, when the data still sat on Google’s servers, may be findable in Takeout.

All you can do is secure what comes next. Extend auto-delete, set the permission to “always”, remove the battery restriction, allow Maps in the manufacturer’s list, and take an export once a year. With those five right, a year from now you will actually have a journey.

Why the record looks patchy

One more possibility: the data is not missing, it is sparse. The phone samples location at intervals to protect the battery, leaning on Wi-Fi networks while it does. In a city there are hundreds around and position is confirmed constantly. On a motorway there is nothing.

The result is a record that is dense in towns and thin between them. That is not a fault; it is the normal shape of the file. And sparse data, unlike missing data, can be filled in — the real road route between two points can be computed and drawn.