Hubitat Background Activity Killing iOS Battery

I’ve set up the Hubitat app on my iPhone and its background activity is consuming my battery in a half day. Is there something I have configured incorrectly that would cause Hubitat to drain my battery?

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I used to have the same problem on an older iPhone 6S when activating geofencing so I kept it off all the time and used the Alexa app for geofencing, when I upgraded to the iPhone 12 Pro I tried using it again and now it's on all the time with minimum effect on the battery.

So it might just have something to do with older iPhones? But since you did not mention your version and IOS it's hard to tell.

I also have a 12 Pro on latest iOS. I’ll try turning off geo fencing as you suggest but it is something I leverage. Thx

Same problem here. Battery gets drained when sitting idle, sometimes as quickly as a couple hours even when charging. But it doesn't always happen. If I reinstall Hubitat app or cycle the power or play with the settings, then sometimes it works for a while. So it's hard to nail down the cause. I have iPhoneSE(2020) using iOS6.1 beta. One other note: geofencing is dodgy at best. Usually don't trigger presence boundaries. I have tried "precise location" and not, but both are equally unreliable.

Only time I have had problems with the Hubitat app draining battery on a few generations of iPhone is when “high accuracy presence” is configured to on from within the advanced presence settings page in the Hubitat app. Note that that’s different than “precise location” in the iOS settings location services menu.

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Thank you, @marktheknife
Turning off High Accuracy Presence seems to have solved the battery drain without turning off geofencing altogether.

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See these... They're tiny and fantastic

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Good idea that is, but my car and me don't go everywhere together. lol :slight_smile: :grin:

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I use mine with Combined Presence Sensor by @jwetzel1492. So depending on a combination of my phone wifi and @iharyadi 's sensor determines if I'm away or present. I always have my phone and so does my wife as well as her presence fob. So depending on the combination it does what it needs to do... Works well...

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I just use apples Geofence whatever you wan to call it's been bulletproof. Apple Knows where I am better than I do. It's the number one reason I use homebridge.

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Can you explain your setup a bit more? I'm all in on Apple, have Homebridge, and Hubitat presence combiner app. Would love to ditch Hubitat iOS app geo-tracking and use a less battery intensive method.

Dont know why the app continues with this issue. Seems like any easy fix that would be acceptable for most. Just make a time delay setting, Check location every X minutes. So its not constantly running. I gave up on the app geofence first day I used it, battery hog.
Also the known issue if you have 2 hubs at different locations geofence can only use one location.

Due to the unreliability of the Hubitat App for presence tracking (we have 3 iPhones in our family an they all act differently, even though they are on the same iOS, App version, and app system-wide settings) I moved to [RELEASE] OwnTracks Presence iOS and Android by @brianwilson. I export and graph all my logs/events to Grafana, so it was super obvious to see that Hubitat App was not doing presence properly (eg. Would come home and it'd say we were still out, or would leave and it'd say we're still home, etc).

Owntracks Presence was pretty straightforward to setup, and once done has been very reliable. I see @brianwilson actually recommends using his [RELEASE] Geofency Presence iOS only implementation if you have solely iOS in your house, but I haven't got around to testing it out yet.

My Setup is pretty simple. On the iPhone side of things just make sure you have Location services on which is under Privacy & Security, while your in those settings scroll down to HomeKit and make sure Precise location is on and your allowing access location. Now you can either setup your automations through HomeKit or make virtual devices in hubitat and share those devices through homebridge and do your automation through HomeKit. I use virtual switches and share them through homebridge as switches. Some automations I have HomeKit do and others I have hubitat do. If you want HomeKit to unlock secured devices, doors for example and you don't want to verify the automation every time theres a plugin for homebridge called dummy switch that you can use.
Screenshot 2022-12-14 at 9.12.42 AM
Example of how I use some virtual switches for hubitat automations. Homekit will turn the switch on or off with presence and then I'll use hubitat to setup the automations. Let me know if you need something else explained in detail but I think that about covers how I have things setup.


Security Switch is the dummy switch Plugin in homebridge

Example for door locks with Dummy Switch plugin.

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Perfect thanks!

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