It’s old news that Life360 closed its garden so both the built-in and custom Hubitat Life360 integrations were deprecated. But I noticed recently that a member of the Home Assistant community revived the Life360 integration here. It has some minor limitations, but I just gave it a whirl with my HA instance and it appears to work great.
Wonder if the great devs around here who did the earlier Life360 integration (@jpage4500, @bptworld, not to mention the built in app @Hubitat_Staff) are aware and whether such an integration could be redeveloped for Hubitat? Yes, there are workarounds and alternatives, but none are as good imho.
Once a company has a stated or an implied intent to block outside useage/access to their API's, I would never spend time or effort trying to circumvent that again. It is only a matter of time before they find a way to break it again.
It openly admits to kludging around with the "undocumented and unsupported API", so I'm all but certain HE staff won't touch this news with a 10-ft pole.
And I'm not sure there's much motivation for a community dev to pick it up, since L360 is likely to close this loophole as soon as they realize it's being exploited at a significant level. But who knows - maybe a dev will try.
At this point, I think it would be foolish for anyone to go back to this integration -- like MyQ, L360 has made it pretty clear they are not down with this sort of thing, so I predict it's a simple matter of time before this door closes too.
quick update.. it took a few tries but I was able to capture the access_token using the method described in the referenced link.
For starters my Life360 account has it's phone number 'verified' which sounds like I'm only able to login by phone number and not email/password
Once a phone number has been verified, the Life360 server will no longer allow this authorization method.
Secondly, my first attempt to login by phone number seemed to work but I never got past the login screen. I ended up disabling all ad-blocking on my browser and that worked. I use Brave Browser and disabled both the
built-in blocking as well as uBlock Origin add-on.
It was a little tricky to find the access_token at first so I captured an image of what worked for me. After logging in with dev tools open, I did a search of "access_token" and the last result was what I was looking for.
It's been a while since I've even looked at the Hubitat driver for this.. in the perfect world users can just input their access_token and that's it. But, I don't know how long that token will last.. I also don't know if there's more that's needed.. but, it's worth a shot taking a look in any case!
I'm going to plug OwnTracks. @lpakula has done amazing continued work with this presence app. It has been reliable for two of us for quite a while now. We keep the free version of Life360 on our phones for shared location info but it is no longer connected to Hubitat.
FWIW you don't have to set up a server of any kind to use the core Owntracks integration...you can if you want to add additional options, but not required for presence tracking.
Life 360 sealed their fate with Hubitat users when they closed their API for Hubitat without any consideration for those paid customers who depended on it.
I just pushed my changes to the Life360+ driver - [here]; so far it's been working for several hours but of course time will tell.. fingers crossed though
I fully agree with this too.. in my case though it was too hard of a sell to convince my family to move to OT from Life360. Which means I still use the app and suffer through all of it's popup ads like everyone else. At least with this integration I won't have to open the app on my phone as often!
Technically it's the same API as it always had been -- but without the login part (which will have to be done manually and isn't super trivial..). It won't be for the plug-and-play type anyway!
That said, I use a lot of Hubitat apps/drivers that are using unsupported API's.. Blink, Orbit B-Hyve, Kasa, Harmony just to name a few.. and I'm super happy they exist too as I wouldn't get nearly the use out of Hubitat if it were just ZWave and Zigbee devices
Could any one of them stop working like Life360? Definitely.. which also sucks but that's why I'm also a Hubitat fan because of the large community of developers who can help get it working again.
