Google used to know everywhere you'd been. Here's what's left.

For about a decade, the best answer to "where was I in April 2017" was Google Timeline. It knew. It knew in unsettling detail, including which airport you sat in and for how long.

That answer has quietly expired, and most articles recommending it have not noticed. If you are rebuilding a flight history, it is worth knowing exactly what changed before you go looking for something that is no longer there.

What changed

Three things, rolled out from late 2024:

Timeline moved onto the device. Location History is now stored on your phone rather than in your Google account. There is no longer a Timeline on the web — the page that used to show your whole history in a browser is gone.

It became per-device. Because the data lives on the phone, each phone has its own. The history from a handset you replaced in 2021 is not on your current one.

The default retention dropped to three months. Unless you changed it, Google now deletes location history older than about ninety days automatically.

Put together: the deep archive most people assumed was sitting in their account probably is not, and if it is, it is on one specific phone.

Check before you conclude anything

It costs two minutes, and the answer varies a lot between accounts depending on what you agreed to and when.

On Android: Settings → Location → Location Services → Timeline. If there is history there, you can export it — look for the option to download or export your Timeline data, which writes a file to the device.

On iPhone: open Google Maps, tap your profile picture, then Your Timeline.

Via Google Takeout: go to takeout.google.com, deselect everything, then select Location History (Timeline) on its own. If your account still holds anything server-side, this is where it surfaces. Do not export all of Google — you will wait a day for a file you cannot open.

If you turned Location History off, or never turned it on, there is nothing to find. That is common and it is not a mistake you made.

If you do have it, what it is worth

Raw Timeline data is a stream of coordinates and inferred places, not a list of flights. Google's own inference is decent at spotting a flight, but the export is more useful read as a place-and-date index than as a logbook.

The technique is the same as with photos: you are not looking for flight records, you are looking for evidence that you were somewhere on a date. Each cluster is a trip, and each trip had a flight at either end. Once you know you were in Lisbon in April 2019, finding that flight in your inbox takes seconds because you know which week to search.

What replaced it, for this purpose

Nothing, exactly — but three things cover most of the same ground:

Your photo library. Still the best casual record of where you have been, and it did not change. Both Apple Photos and Google Photos let you browse by place: open the map, zoom out to the world, and read the clusters. Timestamps give you dates.

Your inbox. Unglamorous and far more complete than Timeline ever was for flights specifically, because a booking confirmation names both airports.

Official records. If you have entered the US on a foreign passport, the I-94 travel history is a dated government list of arrivals and departures. For airlines, a subject access request gets you their copy of your flying, which goes back much further than their website shows.

The general lesson, since it keeps happening

Timeline is the second archive in two years to become unavailable to the people who were relying on it — App in the Air took a decade of flight logs with it in 2024, with a one-month export window that most users never heard about.

The pattern is worth internalising: a history that only exists inside somebody else's product is on loan. Whatever you rebuild, keep a copy you control. Orbit stores your logbook on your device and exports the whole thing as CSV, which is not a feature so much as an apology for the state of the category.

Orbit works offline, so the reconstruction can happen on a plane. Download now.