Iphone presence - no Homekit

[tsitalon1]

Hey guys, long story short, many years ago I had iphones/android all working however I was using a mix of apps to do manage presence.

Fast forward to today, My hubitat hub sat in storage for years and I've had to start over on everything.

What is the best option for iphone presence in 2022?

I'm not having much luck with the native hubitat mobile presence on iphones, all permissions appear correct as in the hubitat documentation.

[bertabcd1234]

First, I don't think it's public yet, but there is at least an iOS app beta (you can get it via TestFlight if you want) that is supposed to address presence issues. So, that may help.

But another option, since you have an iPhone, some people use a HomeKit automation plus a virtual devce shared from Hubitat that turns on/off the device when you arrive/leave. The community "Virtual Presence with Swtch" driver works great for this because HomeKit can turn on or off the switch, while Hubitat can use it as a presence device. This driver is also built-in as of 2.3.4, but there is a bug that prevented it from working properly, and I'm not sure if it was fixed yet (should be soon). The built-in driver is available from Hubitat's now-native HomeKit integration; the community driver would need an "in the middle" solution like HomeBridge.

This shouldn't be necessary, but it is one other option.

[bill.d]

If you don’t have a HomeKit hub Geofency works very well.

[RELEASE] Geofency Presence

I used to use Geohopper for my presence controls but have migrated to Geofency (iOS only, Android folks - but perhaps OwnTracks will work for you?). The benefit of this over the Hubitat app for presence is you can use as many geofences as you want and trigger as many virtual presence sensors as you wish. Benefit of this over Life360 is that you're not giving a company access to your location/private info. My use-case for this over Hubitat's native geofencing is I have a wider geofence to do th…

[ogiewon]

You can also use Locative on the iPhone + MakerAPI on the hub with a virtual presence sensor.

[wiegout]

I've burned more time trying to figure out presence issues than any other single thing on HE. The Apple HomeKit trick works perfectly for my iPhone. But doesn't work for my wife's iPhone. I've quadruple checked every setting. Just never updates. Same is true of pretty much everything else too. Yet the "Find My" app works perfectly so I know that location service does work on it. Anyway, just hoping that this new Hubitat app in beta is the holy grail I've been searching for. I've resorted to only using the community "iPhone WiFi Presence" sensor for her phone with a time out of 13 minutes. This works pretty well and basically better than any other solution. Interestingly, my brand new iPhone 16 Pro wifi can "sleep" as long as 20 minutes making using that solution untenable. I'm an Apple fan generally, but the HomeKit presence is a complete black box with no tools at all to peek under the cover to troubleshoot if it doesn't "just work." I have a dashboard tracking all my various ways of doing presence and it's a crapshoot.

[nclark]

I've been testing out a mix of different ones, Hubitat App, Alexa App, Locative, WiFi presence and soon Homekit or Homebridge. I use presence combiner to do seperate arrive and depart settings (especially for WiFi since iPhones keep turning off it's WiFi radio when not in use, so I only have it confirming at 20 minutes or so, but when arriving WiFi always picks up fast enough.

Locative + MakerAPI is new to me right now, but seems nice with it's different options and multiple geolocations, thinking of trying to determine if I'm on my way home with 2 spots on my usual road and determine based on time if I'm headed towards home or not, if so, start bringing thermostats up before I get home. If this app is reliable, it would be great added feature to automations!!!

[wiegout]

I use Combined Presence which works great. The "Jay" and "Lori" are virtual sensors fed by that app. The app works great. Each of the sensors are flaky in some way. Agree that IP Presence is lighting fast and 100% accurate for arrivals. CP: [RELEASE] Combined Presence

[tsitalon1]

Thanks guys, I'll try iPhone WiFi Presence and presence combiner to see if I can get some reliability here. I really want to avoid adding more apps on our phones if I can help it.

The native mobile presence for my personal Samsung Note 9 seems to work fine... shocker, Android>Iphone

[tsitalon1]

So looks like modern iphones use two mac addresses, one for 5g and one for 2.4g wifi ... This makes life interesting for my router and HE !

[nclark]

Even worse, they spoof roll the MAC address unless you tell it not to, and on each trusted network.