I'm having issues with the mobile app (iPhone XR) switching between present and not present when i'm inside my geofence. it happens maybe a dozen times a day, most the time the phone will just randomly "leave" then return about 4-6 minutes later... last night though it was marked as not present from 3am until 7:45. This happens very frequently (see logs below from just this morning, it's already done it twice in the last hour - yesterday it flipped about 9 times).
It doesn't seem to be related to whether my phone is idle or not either, sometimes it'll "leave" when i'm in the middle of doing something on the phone. It also happens on my wife's phone (iPhone 8).
Anyone have any ideas on what i can do to resolve this? As a safety gap i'm also using Life360 with a combined presence sensor to avoid the "arrives" rules from firing so i don't end up opening garage doors or unlocking doors all day long, but that's a complicated mess with 2 apps and 4 presence sensors per person in the house.
|presence|present||Nick’s iPhone has arrived|DEVICE||2020-01-10 08:58:08.765 AM PST|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|presence|not present||Nick’s iPhone has departed|DEVICE||2020-01-10 08:51:47.093 AM PST|
|presence|present||Nick’s iPhone has arrived|DEVICE||2020-01-10 08:27:03.667 AM PST|
|presence|not present||Nick’s iPhone has departed|DEVICE||2020-01-10 08:20:56.115 AM PST|
|presence|present||Nick’s iPhone has arrived|DEVICE||2020-01-10 07:42:50.202 AM PST|
|presence|not present||Nick’s iPhone has departed|DEVICE||2020-01-10 03:09:07.157 AM PST|
How small is your radius within the app? How "deep" are you in your home? Are you in a 2 story or less home with many windows or are you in a building with many floors (either a high floor or a low floor as both present different problems with GPS)?
If your Life360 is not having the same problem, since both apps will use the same presence generated by your phone, then the problem is definitely somewhere in your geofence settings in the Hubitat app on your phone.
The size and coordinates for both Hubitat and Life360 are the same (250 feet) but i have tried extending it all the way up to above 1,000 feet and hubitat still thinks it has left.
My office at home (where i spend the vast majority of the day) has two windows in it on the second floor.
I tried enabling High Accuracy Presence but that used WAY too much battery. I'm not aware of any other settings i could try. I've added a rule to hit the Life360 refresh button as soon as presence from Hubitat app changes to see if my phone is mis-reporting as you suggest, but even with that immediate refresh (and a second one 10 seconds later) the Life360 presence always remains within the geofence even when Hubitat is still reporting out.
This looks interesting - i'll check it out. It will also save me having to create a bunch of delay rules for leaving.
Do you mean that you are only using your cell-network location and not your GPS radio? Even in high-accuracy mode, your phone should only use the GPS radio to occasionally check the GPS position and not have the GPS radio on all the time. It is possible that Life 360 or another app is forcing GPS location to stay active when you are in high accuracy mode. I would suspect this is why your location is not as accurate as it could be as you float from one cell tower to another.
I don't know what the "High Accuracy Presence" option enables or doesn't enable. I do know that without it or with it i still get the same behavior, but it seems to be less frequent when this option is enabled.
However, with that option turned on, my battery will be at 40% 10 hours after taking it off the charger - without it on, i charge my phone every other day with it hitting about 30% on the second evening.
On an iPhone? Yeah...that is typical battery usage after a full day's usage. If you are not using your GPS radio for locaiton, you are never going to get the level of accuracy necessary to do geofencing reliably.
That's well beyond my typical usage though. My normal usage is about 40% per day (end the day with 60% battery), with high accuracy location on, i'm running closer to 75% battery lost in the same timeframe. It's just not an option to turn that on with that level of battery draw - no other apps (Life360, SmartThings, Alexa, etc...) have that level of battery draw but still have highly accurate and stable presence.
Just to clarify, we’re referring to the “high accuracy presence” setting in the hubitat app, right?
I think that whether or not it’s flagged, an iPhone is using the gps radio for presence. I have tried out both enabling and disabling it, and even when disabled it’s been more accurate than just using cell towers for geolocation would be, I think.
I also found battery drain to be unacceptable when high accuracy presence was enabled in the app. It was somewhat more precise, though.
Would you mind sharing how you did this? Mine and my wife's presence works perfectly (Life 360), but my daughter's seems unreliable (also Life 360). Hubitat will show she left, but Life 360 still shows her present. Thinking this might help with this issue...
Sure, it's really easy - in the newer versions of the Life360 built-in app, they added a virtual device called "Life360 Refresh". I just set up a simple rule in RM that when any iPhone presence sensor changes, push that button 15 seconds later - you can adjust that delay as needed, or even tell it to refresh at 15 seconds and again at 60 seconds. This won't work if the L360 app doesn't show her actually away from home though, so when you have this issue make sure you check in your app to see what you can see for her location:
There is no such setting in the Hubitat app. We're talking about the High Accuracy Location in iOS. If he doesn't have it enabled on the phone, then it is not going to use it. And without that you are not going to be able to use Geofencing reliably.
I have been using beta versions of the iOS app through TestFlight for a while, which added the high accuracy presence option a couple months ago, I believe.
Reviewing the change log in the iOS App Store, it looks like it was added to the standard iOS app a month or so ago.
As @Deadbeat described, it’s not a great option for improving presence detection on iOS because it’s a battery killer. Others have reported the same.
Sure, but i am referring to the hubitat app on OP’s iPhone XR.
I think I understand what type of settings you’re referring to, but I’m not sure iOS has a high accuracy presence setting that selectively enabling/disabling the gps radio only. At least I haven’t noticed it. It’s possible to enable/disable wifi/Bluetooth for location services, which does affect location accuracy.
I think OP misunderstood what settings you meant, and thus I’m trying to clarify that OP was probably referring to the setting in the hubitat iOS app.
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