Just recently updated my mode manager to use my phone presence to detect away/home settings and today I noticed when I opened the app on my phone while I was at work it was triggering my presence at home. Because of this multiple rules got triggered and left my HSM disabled, HUGE ISSUE IMO. Because of this bug I cant use the mobile app for presence as it can cause security issue. Please fix!
Logs from when I opened the app at work
I've had similar issues. There have also been times when I'm the only one home and then all of a sudden all the lights turn off, alarm arms, furnace turns off because the mobile app thinks my phone has left the fairly large geofence area. I sent a message to support but it's 50/50 whether i get an email back these days when I report an issue.
It's best practice to deploy an aggregated presence approach, using geolocation service, WiFi connection, etc. Many posts about this and several apps to help facilitate.
Best practice, maybe, but shouldn't be required which is why we raise these issues in a public forum - so that these issues are brought to light and the developers at Hubitat can continue trying to solve these issues.
Wifi connection as an extra step towards aggregated presence makes no sense as the minute someone's wifi is turned off on their phone, it breaks the whole home away signaling.
To again try and bring light to the issue, just now I'm sitting in my house and again the app thinks I've left the geofence. It seems to think I got into a vehicle for some reason, according to the debug log. My wife got into her vehicle and left, maybe there is some type of connection the Hubitat mobile app senses between my phone and her car (handsfree?) and thinks I got in the car and left?
There are so many variables (carrier, tower position, phone model, battery level, believe-it-or-not weather) that such issues are difficult to troubleshoot.
Hence @Angus_M's suggestion goes beyond being best practice; I'd call it required practice. When he and I used Stringify, collating multiple methods to get location were recommended also.
With Hubitat, I use 3 methods of geolocation for each device: Life360, the Hubitat app, the Alexa app. In addition, I use WiFi location and lock key-codes. As @Angus_M mentioned, there are many apps to aggregate presence from multiple sources; I use @doug's Presence Governor.
My configuration, which uses everything except a fob, looks like this:
thanks @aaiyar for the help. I'm just super frustrated with the amount of work that needs to go into this to make it work. When a consumer looks at hubitat as a home automation option and they advertise they have a mobile app that does geofencing, no one expects to have to go to these lengths to actually get it to work! I feel like there should be a disclaimer on hubitat's part that geofencing is still in beta mode. I've sent soo many debug screenshots to hubitat's support people when I have issues with the presence detection and they don't even reply. Kind of feels like they have already thrown their hands up as well.
There is plenty of blame to go around here. Hubitat can only fix what it can control. I do think the app needs some improvement, but it isn't the cause of everything not working correctly either.
Geofencing part of the app seems to work fine for me, but my Android phone is another story. Once it goes to sleep for a while, the GPS and Wifi turn off to conserve battery. No phone setting I have found fixes that. If I simply wake the phone it magically re-triggers the geofence. The phone also periodically wakes which causes all sorts of fun middle of the night issues due to "arriving" and "leaving" multiple times per hour.
Geofence also gets messed up when I am in places where the phone is shielded, like my work with the thick walls, metal roof, and metalized window film. My old house with its aluminum siding and radiant roof barrier messed with lots of things and their radios.
I fixed the presence issues by using Combined Presence app, which takes two or more devices and makes a determination whether I am home or not. My second presence sensor is the Smartthings tag/fob, which by itself works well enough, but is nearly foolproof when combined with the phone's Wifi and geofence.
I always wondered if using multiple presence app together (Life360, HE, Alexa) to indicate if I'm home or away, would cause conflicts with each other and show false information or not.
This is what I do not understand. The app KNOWS that I am out just by the blue dot, but for some reason still thinks that I am INSIDE the geo area.
I never used geofence on HE android app because of this, very unreliable, but I have ST arrival sensors and they been very reliable compared to ST. I want to try geofence because you can automate stuff not exactly when you just arrived home, anyway, I'm interested to get the app fixed if there is an app issue, android has many restrictions so maybe I have to unrestrict something.
If you are outside the geofence for a longer period of time and it's not picking up, your phone might have become unsynced with your hub and is no longer provided updates. This has happened to folks after updating the android app or a Hubitat platform update.
And how you sync it? Because the app still receives notifications and it has access to dashboards
Two separate functions of the device. If you clear data from the app on your phone when you relaunch it, it should ask you to log back into the hub. Then you can pick the device that was already created previously and it should "slide into" that slot.
But remember, geofencing is not instantaneous. Your phone will report that it's outside the geofence immediately but the device on your hub will not update until it's been outside for a period of time. This is done to prevent random shifts in your location not forcing your presence to change randomly.
I have made sure that its still connected, turned a light on for example. its connected. just not working. I am going to test it out for a few more days, also try the 360 method. they both seem pretty poor.
funny thing is that Smartthings worked a lot better, and over time got really good.. not sure what the issue here is.
If it's not updating at all, waiting longer really isn't going to get it to work all of a sudden. And you do realize that the dashboard function and the GeoFence function aren't really linked, right? One could be working while the other isn't.
then explain what does it do. once the status is present, I have a rule that changes things. thats all I want to do. If they are not linked, then what is the point? But again, per the image above, it shows that I am outside of the fence, but it says in text that I am still inside. and visa versa. I let it sit for a bit to see what it does, sometimes it will update, sometimes , it will not.
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