Phone Not Triggering Away / GeoFence Issue

Hi All,

So for some reason the Present / Not Present mode manager is not working. I have two presence tile on my dashboard and its been a hit and miss with my phone and not working with my Wife's phone at all. Does the app have to be on in the background on the phone? I have double check that our android phones have allowed locations permissions in the app settings. Has anyone had this issue or have any trouble shooting ideas? If i adjust the geofence radius it automatically refreshes and updates to the correct status, but it not triggering on its own. I have also restarted my Hubitat .

Mark

I recently setup geofencing through the Android Hubitat app for my parents hub and while my Dad's phone works about 85% of the time my Mom's works about 10% and I can't see a difference between their settings. At our house our iPhones work about 90% of the time. I also use Life 360 for everyone as well and use the advanced Combined Presence app to allow either Hubitat or Life360 arriving or departing to cause the person to show as departed which makes things work most of the time. I would love to find a way to make my Mom's phone more reliable though.

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Consider using an app like Presence Governor. It can determine presence using input from several presence sensors, including the Hubitat app.

I use it to determine my presence using Life360, the Hubitat app, the Alexa app, and whether my phone connects to my WiFi router.

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I am playing around with that app now, thanks! How did you get a tile for WiFi Presence?

I use @jwetzel1492's iPhone WiFi presence sensor. Don't worry - it works with iPhones and Android phones.

Good luck!

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+1 on Presence Governor and WiFi presence sensor … Hubitat App presence is not reliable/precise enough … been working like a charm since I migrated. I also added an Alexa App Virtual presence trigger to increase event options. Life360 only works if you share your location with a contact … which I didn't want to do.

Which Life360 app are you using had you tried? The built-in one or the one ported by @bptworld? I'm using the latter, and I'm not sharing my location with anyone (besides myself).

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This is great and a great community as well. New to the smart home automation, learning a lot, and really enjoying it. I understand all the setting in the Presence governor except to the "Proxy *" setting. Can someone explain what that is specifically doing or for?

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When I installed Life360 app on my iPhone I could not set up home/work locations unless I had shared my location with at least one person.

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Interesting. I definitely didn't do that. Android vs iOS difference probably.

@Tim-in-Ca

I was wrong. Here's what I did. I created a circle with a single member (me).

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Well, I tried again and I create a new Circle, just called myself … and created home and work (which I got errors, but it managed to save the addresses). Loaded the Life360 connector in HE, I provided my log in credentials, chose the Myself Circle, but Home and Work locations do not show up as options and I cannot complete the Life360 connector setup. Oh, if try to join my Circle it says I'm already a member of that Circle. LOL

See if it works with this:

Thanks … I'll check it out. Or maybe create a second phantom account I can "share" my location to! :slight_smile:

No Bueno … With the 3rd party app, Life360 Places setting not showing up and I can't share home/work location with myself in the app … guess I need to create a 2nd account on my Android tablet and with my Gmail account to get around this …. very odd

Curious why the solutions offered in this thread are work arounds?
I am a noob. I entered this thread because I just set up our phones as devices.
Wife left the house for the first time in days, and it shows her still here.
Plus, I do not see a refresh option.
The thread indicates that this is not reliable at all and needs other methods.
Does this feature work?

Just speaking from my personal experience and understanding here - there really is no "good" single sourced presence solution. Assuming you're comparing the mobile device presence as "the official" solution, this is due to a lot of different reasons, including but not limited to the hardware on the mobile device you're using, the OS/firmware of that device, cell tower and/or GPS signal, etc. Individually, those issues can be addressed, but then there's other trade-off considerations such as battery life.

I do think it's fair to call out that the alternative solutions provided could be considered workarounds, but I think most of us have just accepted this as a reality and are trying to help you achieve your intended outcome.

At least with my phone, it aggressively turns off the radios (both GPS and wireless) when it sits inactive for just a few minutes. That really messes with things, and so is unreliable to use alone.

The only good way I found was to combine (using a combined presence app) wifi, GPS, and a physical sensor (Samsung Arrival sensor) fob.

This combined presence model is nearly flawless. There are a couple different combined presence apps if you search. One from bptworld, and another from jwetzel1492.

It would be nice to have a simple command to "Send Geo Event" ability to be triggered in the Rule Machine. I could write a rule that when my garage door closes, wait 2 mins and send the request to find out if I'm home.
Right now, I can go into the settings in the HE app and do just that and it will update my presence, but fumbling with the phone while driving is a distraction that shouldn't be done.