Erratic Presence

Anyone else having sudden, erratic presence with iPhone? It's usually pretty good. But all three devices in my family, for the last week, are experiencing extremely poor GPS performance.

Having occasional issues with the wife’s iPhone lately.

Nothing more noticeable in the last week for me, my wife or our babysitter. But in general I’m sick of mobile presence on iOS working not-quite-well enough.

Life360 couldn’t quite cut it, even with the refresh they added in HE.

Locative works nearly 100% on one of our phones, and closer to 50-75% on the other two. I really like that it allows you to set different sized fences for arrival and departure though.

I just tried homebridge specifically to get at the Apple Home app’s geolocation, and surprisingly that’s been worse than anything else. For other people it seems to work very well so I dunno what I could be doing wrong there.

The Alexa app’s geolocation seems pretty good, but I haven’t actually changed any automations to make use of it yet.

I just dropped 3 bucks on Geofency to see how that goes, it can send an HTTP GET like Locative.

Sorry, rant over :zipper_mouth_face:.

2 x iphones with Locative working great down here in Oz, although now I've just jinx'd myself.

I'm with you there, Mark. It's been fairly reliable for me for a while, the way I have it setup. But not now, it's useless at this point. I have to find an alternative.

I use a combined presence device with a threshold of 2 and I have 4 apps on each phone that do geofencing. Life360, Locative, Geofency, Alexa.

Of the 4 Alexa is the least reliable, and has the biggest Geofence (doesn't get very small around the house). Geofency and Locative are exactly tied, they always react at the exact same time. Believe it or not, Life360 is the reliability winner currently.

I've tried the ST Arrival Sensors in the past, they're poorly made and didn't last long. None the less I've got some more coming, I'm going to do a battery mod on.

I also have a BLE coming, I'm going to do some experiments with it and a RazPi

Bother life360 and locative work well for me. Not 100% but then I combine lan presence to pick up when it fails.

One thing I did do though was make the fence area big enough so that it wasn't trying to update its status when in a wifi grey area. If driving off my phone is usually hanging on fighting for wifi until the end of my street. I figured in this time any location updates may fail so I set the zone just a but further. It's helped a lot.

What's that? I can't find anything called Bother.

Stupid autocorrect on the iPhone. Changed both into bother. I have a hate hate relationship with the iPhone autocorrect.

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My use case is to turn my alarm off and unlock the front door after I've made it into the driveway. The rule I use uses a trigger for the presence sensor arriving and a condition that my alarm virtual switch is on.

Before, I used WebCoRE presence sensor for the longest time and it worked very well for me. I then moved to the "iPhone WiFi Presence Sensor" just to remove another cloud component from my home automation. I had some issues with it, but after commenting out the runEvery1Minute(refresh) and setting up a separate rule to refresh the presence sensor every 20 seconds I've had no issues.

This will not work if you are looking to have something happen when you are leaving though.

What was the issue you solved by making these changes?

The biggest issue was with timing. On a "fast" day, I can go from pulling into the driveway to standing on the door step in about 30 seconds. Between the time it takes my iPhone to see the WiFi and the fresh, I could be standing on the doorstep for 20+ seconds (not an accurate measurement. That's more like how long it felt to pull my phone out of my pocket and search for the button to turn the alarm off and open the door).

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Gotcha, so the changes you made remove the driver’s built-in refresh every one minute, and replaces that with a rule machine rule that refreshes the device every 20 seconds instead?

Yes

Just started using Hubitat and find odd presence behavior with iPhone XR. I’ll be at home, with the phone sitting in the charger and will get random departure and arrival events. I did set the geofence pretty big in the hopes that I wouldn’t experience issues like this. Any ideas?

Yes iPhones are crap :rofl:

They are very bad at shutting important parts down. You need to change your settings around so that it doesn't as harshly turn off WiFi and GPS.

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@BorrisTheCat Thanks. What settings would that be?

unfortunately i can't get on with apples, the settings are never where they make sense to be. Your have to do a search to find the others with the same issue and hopefully they can point your the correct way, It would make sense that its in the main GPS setting or maybe it's in the specific app settings.

As far as I know, there is no way to prevent iPhone from sleeping the wifi adapter.
That's why, in my Presence Governor app, I chose to make wifi present immediate with wifi, but not rely soley on the wifi driver for departures.

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You are correct. You can not modify a non-rooted iPhone. If you root an iPhone there are options to fix this but if you are going to that extent to downgrade and make your device vulnerable like an Android then you should have taken advantage of the trade in deals over the holidays. :wink:

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LOL, yeah right.

Oh, and for the record - GPS and location services work perfectly on my Note 10+. :stuck_out_tongue:

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