Google Timeline (.json)
Google Timeline is the location history Google Maps keeps of where your phone has been. Its export is a JSON file — location-history.json on iPhone, Timeline.json on Android — and RouteConverter turns it into ordinary day tracks.
At a glance
| Extension | .json |
| Encoding | json |
| By |
History
Timeline began as a cloud feature you could download through Google Takeout. Google retired the cloud-side Takeout timeline export in 2024: Timeline now lives on the device, and the on-device export is the only way to get the data out. Because Google publishes no specification for the file, its shape is known only from the exports themselves — and the two mobile platforms do not produce the same shape.
Where it is used
The export comes out of the Google Maps app on a phone. People reach for it to recover a trip they never recorded deliberately: where a walk actually went, which route a drive took, which places were visited on a holiday.
Structure
The file is JSON, and there are two shapes in the wild. The iOS export is a bare array of time-stamped positions. The Android export nests them under a semanticSegments structure, alongside visited places carrying a semantic type such as Home or Work. Points are bucketed into roughly two-hour blocks, so a single journey is usually split across several segments. There is no elevation anywhere in the file.
How widespread
Ubiquitous but undocumented: hundreds of millions of phones produce it and nothing else reads it natively. It is a personal archive format, not an interchange format — which is exactly why converting it to GPX is worth doing.
RouteConverter support
| Reads | Google Timeline |
RouteConverter reads this format but cannot write it.
RouteConverter 3.7 or later reads both export shapes and builds one track per calendar day, named by ISO date, with all visited places collected into an extra waypoint list called Visits. The format is read-only: the day tracks can be converted to anything else, but RouteConverter cannot write a Timeline file back. The export carries no elevation, so fill it in afterwards if you need it. Step-by-step instructions for getting the file off the phone are in the help page, Google Maps Timeline exports.