This is frustrating.
I’ve used SmartThings and hubconnect to work around this for years and haven’t skipped a beat. I can understand iOS updates breaks things but for some reason SmartThings is unaffected.
Does none of the staff / developers of Hubitat use this system for more than a simple sandbox setup?
FWIW I never found ST geofencing to be very reliable (circa 2015-2018, when I stopped using ST entirely).
This is exactly my point ... if Geofency and Life-360 can get geofencing to work reliably, then why can't Hubitat?
And if it's aggressive battery management, I don't understand why it didn't just work this afternoon as I drove into my neighborhood with the Hubitat loaded (not backgrounded). Still nothing. My wife, same phone/settings with the app NOT loaded, also still shows, hours later, not present. The app on both phones shows us inside the geofence. If I go into settings and tap "Send Geo Event", it updates my presence immediately. From my view, it "seems" the app just isn't sending the event, and/or not checking to VERIFY that the hub received and acknowledges the update.
I share OP’s frustration. I’ve been using Hubitat for several years and in that time, I’ve had several different iPhones and worked through several iOS’s - HE Presence has never been reliable.
I have always found this quite shocking, especially the silence from HE staff on the subject….for years. They’ve had a long while to find a solution.
I use HomeKit and SmartThings Presence, as a workaround. I’ve found ST presence reliable for many many years. It’s the only reason I still have an ST hub! I should not have to find a workaround.
I think your on to something there. I have 2 instances of my phone on the hub. I have deleted the newer one over and over but it keeps coming back. Is there a way to change the app back to the original phone entry or do I have to change all my automations over to the new phone entry? I see the device ID in the app "about" section is the newer one. Any idea how this even happened? Could it be the new mode manager app?
Those virtual devices are created by the phone app, and happen when you go to (on the phone app) settings, Hub, then by either selecting a hub and device name, or creating a new device.
It sounds like you are using create a new device, unless there is a bug where it is doing it for some reason when you are selecting an existing device. If you can replicate a bug, it surely can get fixed. Ramon has pushed out a couple Beta recently, he probably could fix this before the next release if it proven to be a bug.
I don't believe the only issue with the phones is aggressive battery throttling. But, it is one of the most problematic. For what it is worth, it is not just the Hubitat app that you have to be concerned with. For instance, on Android, almost all apps that use geofencing rely on Google Play services for the location monitoring. So, in addition to the app in question, such as Hubitat, Ecobee, Smartthings, or whatever you are trying to keep alive for geofencing, you ALSO have to find a way to keep Google Play Services up and running all the time.
As I said before, I did a bit of research on this when I had issues back in the ST era. At the same time, I was having geofencing reliability issues with every app I was trying to use my phone for geofencing with. This includes Smartthings, Ecobee, IFTTT, and Life 360.
In addition to the aggressive battery situation, I also found out that using a magnet anywhere near your phone (Like the cases that have magnetic closures and those popular magnetic mounts systems) will cause your compass calibration almost instantly degrade. Guess what? Google play services requires your compass to be somewhat accurate to get a proper location (I don't know why, but it is what it is). I did not know right away what was causing the compass issue. But, I had read about an app called GPS info that would allow you to keep GPS alive and give you a visual indication of the compass calibration (red/yellow/green). Using that, you could do the magic figure 8's that recalibrate your compass. There are several sites that stated you could do this with 3 or 4 figure 8's. That turns out to not be true for a compass that has been screwed by a magnet. I would spend upwards of 5-10 minutes fixing my compass calibration. That is when I researched to find that the magnets were the cause. I was having to do this 2-3 times a week. Everytime I got home and did not see myself as present, I would check, and sure enough, 9 out of ten times, the calibration of my compass was off.
Interestingly, I found that staying away from magnet cases and mounts has left my phone in a state that I have not needed to calibrate my compass but once or twice in the two years since I discovered. Fixing, or at least understanding the aggressive battery issues by removing Hubitat, Google play services, and the GPS Info App from battery optimization and putting them in never sleeping apps has left my phone reliable until two Android updates ago. Then, I figured out how to pin Hubitat to the most recent apps. So, that has at least temporarily fixed it for now.
What this came down to was that I was blaming: Ecobee, IFTTT, Smartthings, Life 360, and other apps for something that my phone was doing wrong 99% of the time. If it were just Hubitat, then that would point to an app problem, but all it takes is a simple Google search to find that nearly every app that uses geofencing has issues and the vast majority boil down to the phone aggressively killing services or problems with the phones location services.
So, while I share your frustration, I don't think it is an issue that Hubitat can solve for us unless they can come up with a way to prevent phone OS's from killing our apps and fix everyone's varying issues with their specific issues with location services in general.
So, since I need something that work, I use Hubitat native which works 99% of the time now that I have dealt with most of the phone issues. As a backup, I use a tasker profile to push an update to my presence sensor if my phone misses. That fixes the majority of the other 1%. On the rare (once every 3-6 months) occasion that both of the former methods fail to work immediately, I have a dashboard that I can just open and toggle.
Arlo
Solved: Arlo Geofencing not working correctly when using ... - Arlo Community
Ecobee
https://www.reddit.com/r/ecobee/comments/lx4ztj/ecobee_smart_geofencing_doesnt_work_as_advertised/
Life 360
Why Does Life360 Show the Wrong Location?
Smartthings
ST Geofencing problem Android 13! - Android - SmartThings Community
I have many virtual app devices. I do not know how, cause I jave never been in that particular screen but the app created and registered itself to that nee phone entry. I set it back to the original so I hope this fixes it.
I also discovered a mobile presence device I use for work presence through my dashboard was still in there referencing mode manager. I was not listed in mode manager though, is it possible I still have remnants of the old mode manager in the hub? If so how do i locate and wipe it out?
Would you be willing to share on what phone(s), what phone OS and version, and what Hubitat app version is working for you? Just another data point. Thanks!
I'm not using the hubitat app? I'm using locative. https://apps.apple.com/app/id725198453
My iOS Hubitat app geofencing works 50% of the time. Obviously, this is frustrating especially since other apps get it right: Google Home and SmartThings have been 100% for the last year or two, so it's possible to do.
Although I'm unsure of how much it works vs how much it doesn't, Hubitat Geofencing is sufficiently inaccurate that it makes it useless. It's really pretty bad. I can be home for days without it knowing that I am home. I can be away for hours with no indication that it knows I'm gone. It was the same with SmartThings for me. But in both cases, I ended up using webCoRE's Geofencing and that works consistently and reliably for me.
One more data point for anyone at Hubitat that might be (hopefully) monitoring this thread:
Wife and I left home with BOTH identical iPhones (details in orig post) set with Hubitat app loaded and displayed. We watched our little dot move away from the geofenced area. About 5-mins after leaving the area, her status finally switched to "Out of Geofence"; after arriving at our destination 25 miles away, mine still showed "Inside of Geofence". After swapping the view from Geofence to Dashboard, it finally changed status.
Later, on arriving back home, we watched our dots on both phones enter the geofence. My status changed in the app only after switching the view to Dashboard.
But as I write this a half hour later, the hub/dashboard still shows us BOTH NOT PRESENT.
Conclusion: This is NOT a background, battery-saver issue. This is an app coding issue.
Hubitat support staff: I'm invested in the Hubitat ecosystem, and do appreciate all you're trying to do. I subscribe to services to help insure ongoing cash-flow. Given that geofencing is touted as a Hubitat feature, I feel it kinda ridiculous to buy additional hubs/services, and the added layers of complexity, to obtain functionality you claim to offer.
May I humbly request some resources be pulled from new features, and applied to fixing what seems a longstanding problem. Bueller, Bueller, anyone there?
For me, S8+, S9+, S10+, and S21 Ultra and S21FE have all worked solidly with battery optimization and location/compass issues addressed. The optimization has to be turned off after almost every update.
Try deleting the older one. The app uses the last device created.
Highly unlikely.
We keep finding solutions but then the OS updates and we have to start over. We will keep fine-tuning, that's for sure.
I know that's what you want to believe but as many of us already stated , several of us are using other Apps to do what Hubitat claims to do.
Maybe it's time to hire someone that specializes in mobile apps..
Not a fair comparison, though. Google Home aggregates multiple Google devices to avoid false positives, while Samsung controls the operating system on Android, so they have the upper hand in the game. And yes, Life 360 seems more reliable, but they also have a high battery usage. If Hubitat app would be taxing your battery as much as Life 360, you wouldn't be happy that you'd have to charge your phone more often. Sure, Hubitat geofence is not pefect, but giving the countless variables that are involved, our engineers will continue to work on improving the experience as much as possible.
It' fair game, I'm 100% iOS. SmartThings App gets it done.
Bobby, I appreciate the challenges. If these are so daunting, then why not just dump the GeoFencing function in the app and encourage the community to either find compatible solutions or wait on geofencing to mature? Continuing to force your customers, especially those like me that didn't know better, to encounter the frustration of a broken "feature" with no glimmer of hope it will get fixed does NOT reflect well on Hubitat. I've spent countless hours thinking I must have just missed a setting or something only to learn this is essentially a dead end. Rip off the bandaid and let's get over it?
Download the Hubitat app
