Not sure what’s going on but since the last update, my geopresence is almost never right. And when I get home it can take up to 30 minutes before Hubitat realizes I’m actually home. It’s pretty much useless not. Take a look at this screenshot.
I wish that the Hubitat Dev team would take to the guys that do the Nexx Garage Door app. The Nexx app geofencing works flawlessly every single time. It’s amazing. Whatever they are doing, Hubitat needs to replicate it completely.
The most reliable way to geofence presence with Hubitat is to multiplex it. There are plenty of apps designed for that purpose: Combined Presence, Presence Governor, Presence Plus, Presence Central ....
I have been having problems also. If you’re using iOS and Homebridge you can create a virtual presence sensor and have the Apple Home app turn it on/off. That has been working for me.
THanks guys I will look at those options. Super frustrating considering how well I KNOW it can work. I wish they would get this straightened out. I did a lot of searching before I posted and this seems to get a major issue for a lot of people. Sounds like their PM needs to get off his/her rear end and fix this.
I just did a combined presence as well just today in preparation of a garage door automation. It's unfortunate that presence is so bucky, but I've also noticed this with life360 and alexa as well. And it's different for every person. Mine is maybe a minute behind, my husband is sometimes up to 10. So, it's not just apparent in Hubitat. But knowing that gps depends on a satellite and the posiiton plays a huge role in accuracy. Here in the midwest, it's low in the sky, so communication can be sketchy if you drive behind a tall building and you don't have wifi on. In the grand scheme of things, I'd rather see the developers fix the big issues and let the community developers help to solve the trivial. It's just an opinion, but for what I use presence for, I've decided that I want more than one thing verifying that I am where I am. Just an added benefit that there's apps out there to do it for me because I have absolutely no coding skills whatsoever.
You can see how I have 'weighted' what triggers us coming home: Wifi detected OR Alexa
You can see how I have 'weighted' what triggers us leaving home: Alexa or it noticed Alex AND Wifi detected say false at the same time.
To top it off i then have the 3 inputs say if anyone is home (me, my wife and 'guest')
What I love about this is both the guest override AND by having "Someone Is Home" as a virtual presence switch, on my dashboard I can also always force "some is home" state manually by flipping that switch whenever I want, with confidence it will switch back off when we leave.
Hope this makes sense. This has been incredibly reliable for me, so much so I have abandoned the idea of getting Fobs for more physical checks (yay for my wallet!).
I agree with everyone's recommendation to go with a Combined Presence solution. However, my presence only became rock solid when I finally added Life360 to the mix.
Originally I was only using the Mobile App + [UPDATED] iPhone WiFi Presence Sensor. Unfortunately my Android phone kept turning off WiFi when it slept. The presence sensor itself works really well, so this was a nuance of my hardware. I'm assuming the Life360 app itself is doing more active check-ins and making the presence status more accurate.
Agreed. Some sort of external Geo fencing solution is needed to complement here.
Be that Life360 (most recommended here), Alexa (what I use with mixed results) or other services out there (someone on another related thread mentioned success with locative.io ).
Guys, I use Presence Governor to multiplex around the problem as well. Which is fine for now.
That said, I still wonder--what gives with the HE app? Why can't the otherwise super performing Hubitat team lick the presence issue? I understand it's tricky, but other players in the industry have solved it. It's not impossible. Worse, I still can't quite tell if the Hubitat team is: (a) acknowledging it's still a problem and they are working on it (ok, I suppose); or (b) saying "now, it should work, so if you have problems let's us know".
For me, I have 8-10 mobile devices across the six members of my family and NONE of them reliably show presence. (hmm, maybe I should use HE app presence as a random binary number generator?)
Communication has been sparse on this front. Anyone have any insight or thoughts to share?
To be fair, I'm using the Alexa app on iOS for geofencing, and it's as unreliable as the HE app was for me when I first tried it. So for me both Amazon and HE just can't get this to work - that's not an excuse, but tells me this is harder than it seems.
I'm considering switching it to Life360. some other tool, or setting up HomeKit integrations to get Siri to trigger arrivals/departures for my family.
It's curious I never had an issue with ST classic or the new one. Why can ST do geolocation? I know I can pass through the ST geolocation via Hubconenect but why should I have to? I'm trying to reduce hubs not keep old ones in the network.
Fair question. Some people around these parts seem to have no trouble with Hubitat presence. By contrast, we have constant problems. The only way I've been able to solve the problem is to use multiple concurrent methods of geolocation (e.g., ST, Hubitat, wifi, Alexa, etc.), and then use any of the custom apps available on these boards to combine them into a single virtual presence sensor.
