As I mentioned, Apple wants tracking to be controlled by the person being tracked.
First, you need to go into Home Settings on YOUR phone and Invite a person to control your home. (This basically ties your Home app and theirs together.) They have to, on their phone, accept the invite.
You then, go back into Home Settings on your phone and allow them to edit the home. (This gets Automation icon added to THEIR phone.)
From there it's pretty similar to before.. you have to create an automation, find the location(s) and identify what switch to poke. Remember that you have to create two automations per location AND that you have to adjust the switch to be On for arrived and Off for departed.
I just did this for my kid's phone and I was successful, I think. I set it so that when at school, a school specific virtual presence switch is set. I had to do all of the above. However, at the end, I disabled their Edit the home rights, so I don't know if that kills their Automation functionality.
( after I did all the above, I also had to delete the default My Home instance. When I opened their phone's Home app, it has a default home called "My Home". When I invited them to control the home, it used the name I picked on my phone. Which meant that phone had two homes, an empty default and the "Our Home" that came from the Invite.)
Ok, that was the missing piece! I had to go back in and allow them to edit the home... Thank you sir! I'll try out setting them up and then removing or leaving the permission to see if it changes anything...
I have kind of an odd approach to "agentless" iPhone presence that is as accurate for me as any app I've tried. I use three different methods... @thebearmay's Hubitat Ping presence device, @jwetzel1492's iPhone presence detector, and @mike10's unifi presence detector. If all three fail to detect presence for a predetermined amount of time (usually 5 min) I decide someone is actually gone. It is usually extremely accurate at detecting presence (if it says the person is present then they actually are), and pretty accurate at detecting absence (unless the person turns off wifi).
@csteele I just want to thank you for helping me get this set up... I have multiple locations now working for the entire family... Location was something I was struggling with, as I'm sure many others are... This really seems to be the best option for Apple phones...
Mine is so reliable, I have Present/On tied to my Garage Door Opener (GDO) during the day. It was initially an experiment to see if it was reliable enough. Every failure would a) be noisy, the door sends vibrations that can be heard through the house, but not so loud as to be bothersome. Additionally, the Tilt Sensor on the GDO will cause an Announcement AND if the Door is open too long, another Announcement, repeated at 90 second intervals.
I've had zero false garage door events since I started this and it's been at least a year. (My initial experiment involved wanting the garage door to open when I got home from taking the kids to school. )
If I happen to be sitting inside the "strong ring" of the local Cell tower, then my reliability would be strong, I assume. My phone is unlikely to miss pings, I'd assume.
If someone else was further out from the Cell Tower, on the "weak ring", then I'd not be shocked by false changes due to the natural interference, The Cell Tower is tall, but get far enough away and it vanishes below the horizon. Thus somewhere in between, the signals are close enough to the ground that a passing truck can interfere.
