Is the native app's geofence based presence detection just completely useless now? I had it working somewhat for a week or so, but now it's completely unreliable. I've turned off battery optimization for it, and widened up my geofence to encompass my entire neighborhood, but it still won't update on time. It seems I actually have to open the app to get it to work. I set up a virtual switch so I can use my Google assistant to switch from away to home so I could switch modes without opening the app, just to see how long it would take to update on it's own. Yesterday it took 6 hours. It woke my house up after I had already gone to bed. I've been home for two and a half hours tonight, and I just now got the ENTER notification. Turning off battery optimization for this app has made a noticable difference in my phone's battery life. You'd think it'd be wasting all that battery power on actually checking it's coordinates, but that doesn't seem to be the case. My phone is a OnePlus 5 running Android 10.
We have the same experience unfortunately. I have had to remove the phones from the automation since they have had such unreliable timing. Using Life 360 worked, but kills my wife's phones (slows everything down and drains battery).
The ST arrival sensor work decently for us, but I wish the app worked more reliably. We always have our phones, but not always take both vehicles (where the arrival sensors live). Until then I am on the search for something else. Happy to hear any alternatives.
Stupid question but is the app allowed to get location when it's not running? Android 10 has been a giant PITA for me since they introduced a bunch of new security settings like prevent apps that aren't open to access locations, etc.
Yes, I double checked that. It has permission to access location at all times.
This seems to be more of a general phone problem in my opinion. I have had this across multiple platforms and with multiple apps that rely on GPS. Geolocation just doesn't work consistently on my Motorola Android, and I don't think that is unique to my phone. The reason seems to be that my phone, and seemingly many new phones, puts all the radios to sleep very aggressively. Within a few seconds or so of the screen timing out, the Wifi and GPS shut off or go into a standby mode or something. Unless the phone is constantly awake, it just isn't transmitting. Great for battery, bad for using the phone for this.
The solution was to use a Hubitat app called Combined Presence along with another app called I-Phone WiFi Presence. Ignore that name, it works with Androids. That WiFi app detects when your phone connects to your WiFi router, and acts as a secondary form of presence. I added a Samsung Arrival sensor into the mix too. So I have 3 sensors in total.
So what this combined presence app does is it looks at multiple presence forms, and give a "clean" output. For example, you can set up logic within this app that all sensors have to leave before it considers that you are away. You could use the opposite logic that if any sensor arrives, you are home.
Thanks, that sounds like it has some potential. I'll give it a go this weekend. I've been playing around with life360 as well and it seems to be an improvement. I was hesitant because there's a lot of negative reviews on the app store regarding its real time gps tracking.
I am the same as @neonturbo I use the app presence governor, I use the He app, life 360, wifi presence and Alexa presence. I then set it so that 3 of them must show I have left before HE shows away, then 2 of them have to show arrived before it shows I have arrived. I use this to open my garage door and it has been working well. What I have now added is an ultrasonic sensor to check if my car is in the garage so that it wont open the door if it detects that my car is in the garage when I arrive.
This setup has been working very well so far.
Ditto. I haven’t found a single, bulletproof mobile presence solution since I started looking in 2015.
@jwetzel1492’s WiFi presence device and combined presende app can help a lot. There are some other community-developed apps that work similarly, presence governor by @doug is another example.
Great advice, I'll have to check that out. I tried HE, but it didn't seem to work, so I've been using the life360. But with that, I've had false positives that I was away.
Even Google Nest struggles. I'll get a notification on their app stating "looks like we incorrectly reported your presense" or something along those lines. That was a bit of a head scratcher since if they knew that, why did they mess it up?
Thanks @marktheknife, I'm about to release a V2 of Combined Presence. Look for it before Monday.
Cool! Looking forward to see what magic you have done this time. It works well now, so I don't know how you can improve upon it much.
It's mostly a documentation and guidance update. It guides users into using the correct settings, so they don't have to figure out which logical categories to put their sensors into.
Will be fully backwards-compatible too, so it won't break any existing installations.
I'll be looking for it!
Well, I got combined presence set up and it's working. I'll see how the timing works out over the next week, but I've left the house a few times and so far everything is working correctly. I'm using life360 and the iPhone wifi presence. It seems to work on my OnePlus as expected, but I had to turn off the "randomized MAC" option in Android 10 so my router could give my phone a static IP. Wasn't something I was aware Android 10 did. I'm thinking I may still add an ST Arrival sensor to the mix.
I have just release V2.0 of Combined Presence. The best way to get the update is to install via Hubitat Package Manager, but you can also install directly from GitHub.
It should be fully backwards compatible and not break any existing combiner instances.
The most important update is the new "Standard Combiner". This instance has the optimal logic for detecting presence of a person using multiple geofencing and wifi-based presence sensors. You don't have to think about the boolean operations involved. It just does it the best way based on the performance characteristics of the different sensor types.
I'm relieved that I'm not the only one experiencing presence issues on with the app...
I am really looking forward to trying version 2.0 of Combined Presence! Version 1 has been absolutely awesome. What has been working for me is combining:
- Hubitat App's presence (which has been extremely flaky for me of late on iOS)
- Google Wifi reporting devices on the wifi via IFTTT to toggle a presence switch (Which stopped working on July 19th)
- IFTTT Location to toggle a presence switch
Initially all 3 have worked, but at least 1 typically does, so it has worked well for me without being to hard on the battery.
Has anyone heard of a way to incorporate iOS's "find my" capability to Hubitat? I would add that to the mix if I knew how...
A couple things:
- Yes, the presence built into the Hubitat app has never worked reliably for me. I don't use it at all anymore.
- Check out the chatter from the last couple days on this topic: [UPDATED] iPhone WiFi Presence Sensor It might help with your wifi detection.
- You can also try out my driver: https://community.hubitat.com/t/updated-iphone-wifi-presence-sensor It's named iPhone presence, but it works for Android too.
- You can incorporate iOS's "find my" capability by integrating with HomeKit. You'll have to set up HomeBridge on a device like a Raspberry Pi. It's a bigger topic than I'll be able to cover in this reply, but it works very well.
Jut installed it and set it up. I added it to the combiner V2.0 and moved my rules from the "Add a new Boolean-OR Combiner" to the "Add a new Standard Combiner". It works great! It got tested a few minutes afterwards by my wife leaving, but IFTTT staying stuck on "present"... Her presence status changed as soon as she left.
Thank you for the update!
Its been my experience that if you want a solid presence sensor using an android phone use a combination of Tasker and Autolocation apps with Hubitat Maker API. When you hit the specified Geo zones, the trigger is just about instantaneous. I used this setup when I used ST and recently modified it for HE.
That sounds great! Unfortunately, I have an iPhone, and am not familiar with tasked... probably an Android app?
