Shouldn't suffer that same fate. OwnTracks is just a standalone mobile app (open source) sending locations, with all the control done in Hubitat. This is different than Life360 where the app talks directly to the Life360 cloud server.
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How do you do presence with google home? I'm interested in checking into this!
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These routines turn on/off a virtual presence switch in hubitat.
Very crude but reliable so far.
We still have life360 on our phones not connected to hubitat if we want to spy on each other LOL
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I haven't tried it but you can put any address in the routine, so you could have a switch for work/home/school etc...
Nice! Thanks for sharing that.
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Just in case anyone else has the same issue I've been chasing for the past few days I thought I'd chime in:
I had been using both the Hubitat app and Google Home for determining presence, and recently Google Home stopped working correctly. Both my wife and I got new phones in the past few months, so it may have had to do with the setup of the Google apps on the new phones, but it also could have broken due to app updates or some other gremlins.
I have both the Google Home and Nest apps installed since I have a few Nest smoke detectors. They both have home/away functions and the way they interact is confusing at best, and broken at worst. What is working for me at the moment is to use the Nest app to determine home/away, which results in the Home app showing "You're using this feature on a different phone. You can switch to this {Device model}".
I've tried a few times to turn off the home/away function in Nest and turn it on in Google Home, but that hasn't seemed to work for me, so I'm just going with using the Nest app for now.
Have you tried using the built-in presence sensing instead of the 'when I arrive at a location'?
Home app -> Settings -> Presence sensing -> Allow this home to use phone locations
Your post may have solved the issue I just posted about... When I tried to set up a 'when I arrive at a location' automation, I found out that the Home app didn't have 'use precise location' turned on. I've turned that on and I'm going to see if I can turn off the Nest app and use the Home app instead.
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Yes I have that function setup too but not really using it in hubitat. It works with the phones in your home as " someone is home " or " noboby is home ". It works well too i just like having the seperate presence for each home user.
For example i like the yard lights to come on when i arrive even if my wife is already home.
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Ah... I didn't connect the dots on that and I agree, that is one of the things I don't like about Google Home presence. Not being able to see the individual phones makes it harder to troubleshoot if something does go wrong. I think I'll give the location-based routine a try using virtual presence sensors.
Thanks for posting!
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It works very well. I compared it with life360 for timing and it was the same or better for how quick it triggered.
It's really weird, my home app doesn't have this setting, even I updated to the latest version, and google home presence has not been working for me at all....
"Home app -> Settings -> Presence sensing -> Allow this home to use phone locations"
What setting are you missing? If you go make a routine/automation in home app can you select "when i arrive or leave a location" as a starter? you have to create it as a personal routine not a household routine
My home app doesn't have the "presence sensing" in settings
are you on the public preview build?
Try adding a home and away routine to trigger the presence setting
Didn't know I need to be on public preview, I'll join and see. Thx.
I don't know if you do or not. But doesn't hurt to be.
But either way you may have to add those two routines then it will go through the permissions for using presence I think
I have managed to set this up on an Android but I can't figure out if this works on an iPhone. My Google Home is setup and each family member has the presence sensing configured and working. Thus Google Home switches between Home and Away accordingly with a mix of Androids and iPhones being used.
However when setting up a personal routine on the iPhones the last option, "When I arrive at or leave location" is missing. I know Google Home is using the location as when they come and go from home, it is recorded in the presence activity.
An I missing something as to why my iPhones cannot setup a location based routine?
iPhone 12 iOS 17
iPhone 15 iOS 17
Exactly the same experience with my phone (android) and my wife's (iPhone).
Really frustrating that the option doesn't appear and nothing I could find when I looked previously to suggest that it should or shouldn't be there.
On the iPhone how are you then keeping track of presence?
I see other options like Geofency Presence but that comes with a cost and iPhone WiFi Presence Sensor is another option but I didn't want a constant ping on my network.
I'm not currently. The deal with my wife is whatever we pick has to work reliably given the impact of false triggers/reporting that would occur.
The Google Home solution works 100% for me as far as I can tell. It's such a shame it won't extend to IPhone.
I've tried a few including one that shared the exact address/location of the user with the Hub (and therefore me), this crossed a bit of a line for me. Others have been very glitchy.
My last experiment was to use a ping command (in Rule Machine I think) to regularly ping the ip address of her phone regularly, but this only works on the range of the WiFi, not a perimeter zone and it's also really unreliable and says the phone hasn't responded to the ping when it's definitely on the WiFi.
I also have Home Assistant connected to my HE Hubs, but my knowledge of that is limited and I use it mainly for the dashboard functionality and for some Zigbee devices that won't work with HE. From what I can tell there is the same presence challenges on that platform too.
Wish I could help more but it seems we are in the same boat
