Arrive Home - iPhone Presence

Thank you for the link. Was hard to track down what the latest and greatest is.. Home/Homekit (Hubitat)/IOS Shortcuts/Apple TV seems to be not tracking well these days on the latest betas on all devices.

I've been using "the Apple path" (AppleTV, HomePod) for 5+ years and I cannot say it has NEVER let me down, I can say it has never made it hard to use.

I get a Notification on my iPhone/watch with each presence event, and that tells my 'mental reliability calculator' to increase or decrease my perception of reliability. My most common diminishment is due to delay. 90+% of the time the notification beats me to the door. When it doesn't, often it's a very noticeable delay. I have always attributed the delay to a busy Apple server. It's not hard for me to imagine they have a cluster of servers receiving geo updates in the millions per second. IF one of those servers needs a reboot, the remaining probably inch towards saturation. My geo event, in my imagination, takes much longer to be processed during those minutes. It's pretty rare, which is why I attribute it to human tinkering. Computers are much faster at screwing up :smiley:

I've had the same set of Automations (which also show up in Shortcuts, so the two are largely synonymous to me) for the entire time. The only thing that's changed for me over those years is how I use the data. The first 3 years sent notifications only because like a lot of people around here, opening my home's doors to ONE false positive would be horrible to me. With those 3 years of notifications to lean on, I concluded that I can open my garage door for my children's school runs. Now, for at least a year, from 8 in the morning to dusk, when I arrive home, the garage door opens. I've had zero false opens. I do get the occasional delay, but those are small but noticeable delays of roughly 15 to 30 seconds.

I guess my point is... if your geographical location is well served by Apple + your carrier, the Apple Presence Ecosystem is hard to beat. But if your locale causes the iPhone to slide in and out of connectivity due to carrier 'shadows' then that reliability must decrease. My results tell me 1) my Internet connection to Apple (allowing server to my Home events) is consistently good, and 2) my immediate home area is not in any carrier valley or shadow, allowing my phone to accurately send events to that array of Apple geolocation servers.

Final point.. I have (thus far) never downloaded the Hubitat Mobile App. I have never tried Locative, never tried Life360, or any alternate. I comment only on my ultra limited experience with Presence.

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