Great, thanks, that gives me the overall plan. One question though, it sounds like you need one "static" Apple device in the home to execute "4"? It can't all be done in a phone?
Correct.
Because the Apple Home app on your iPhone needs to communicate its location to an Apple Home hub on your home network, when it is away from your home network. This is an Apple HomeKit requirement - and is necessary for all location based automations through the Apple Home app. Has nothing to do with Hubitat per se.
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As an update, I spoke too soon and presence sensing using Webcore hasn't worked at all for the last two days and I'm currently exploring other options. Nothing has changed with either HE or my phone. It would be great if the Hubitat team could sort this out.
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My final submission on this: I'm abandoning Hubitat's GeoFencing (as have many others), as this is clearly not a priority.
A support staff had messaged me in late December asking for more info as I had offered to help troubleshoot. I sent the below message on Jan 2, and as of today (Feb 9) have heard no response.
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Good morning...
1/2/2023
When you're back at this, I thought I'd get this started with some info from my troubleshooting steps so far:
Phone(s): iPhone 14 Pro x2; IOS 16.2 on both.
Hubitat: C7; v 2.3.4.123 ID:
Hubitat App on iPhones: v1.2.8 Bld: 145
.. app settings/IOS:
... Location: Always
... Local Network: On
... Motion & Fitness: On
... Background App Refresh: On
... Cellular Data: On
.. Hubitat App Settings:
... Enable Geofence: On
... Advanced: All Off
As I write this, looking at the Hubitat app on my iPhone, it correctly shows my location and notes "Inside of Geofence" The hub however, shows us both away ... and we've been home (our geofence) for at least 18 hours. I just tapped "Send Geo Event" on my phone and the hub now correctly shows my presence at home.
A couple of days ago, we left the house together, loaded the hubitat app and left it showing on both phones. The app correctly tracked us as we left the geofence area, but they only updated the status message "Inside of Geofence" like 10+ minutes after we had left the fence boundary, and even then the dashboard never reflected the status change.
Two things seem to force a status update:
- Changing the geofence boundary.
- Tapping the "Send Geo Event"
This test tells me that neither IOS battery handling, nor background handling are to blame as the app was always running in the foreground and tracking our location on the map.
Let me know how I can help next.
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My concern, beyond the obvious frustration of a stated feature they cannot make work reliably, is how this bodes for home automation in general. I love Hubitat and all it offers. But as it grows in complexity, will they be able to maintain it over time? What other function(s) we rely upon might stop working and is deemed, for whatever reason, not worthy of fixing? I so want Hubitat to succeed, and I deeply hope they factor ongoing maintenance into their business model. It's clearly not there yet.
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When the Hubitat Presence/Geofencing software fails miserably and switching to the webCoRE presence sensor/geofencing (in my case) is the only change made and my geofencing now runs perfectly, the fault lies completely within the Hubitat Presence/Geofence software. It's not, as some have said, the phone's configuration settings, etc. Same phones. Same hub. Same settings all around. Just the Hubitat software.
I moved to Owntracks presence, which was a lot better, but still not perfect. I have now settled on Geofency presence which has been rock solid for months now. Our household is iPhone.
I cannot emphasize enough that if you’re iPhone only, you should be using Geofency. I make nothing off recommending it, but the price is worth it for the accuracy.
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If you have an apple tv or homepod/home pod mini, the homekit presense is almost bulletproof
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I'm also having success with the Homekit presence. I only wish I could control the radius around my location. There may be a bug in the Home app or the iOS I'm on, when I add a new location and try to save the radius I select it disappears. I'm hoping it's an issue that will be fixed.
Unfortunately I feel we live in a world where the number of things we interface with that don't work well continues to rise. As things become more interconnected and complex the number of failure points increases. Whether we like it or not we're all slowly getting used to broken things being the norm and it's a real shame. And yes I feel like a crusty old guy saying that.
Living with broken software is a collective choice. One I refuse to embrace. These are fixable problems. The companies behind these devices and related code are driven by the usual profit motive. If enough of us users dump the product, submit valid negative reviews, and/or submit valid support cases to the point we can't be ignored, companies will respond or pay the price. The problem is often that people complain without being willing to engage with real information for support and engineering to troubleshoot. Partnership goes both ways.
In this case though, if Apple and Geofency can make presence work on iPhone, why can't Hubitat? So many referrals to alternatives. If we don't expect Hubitat to make a touted feature work properly, what motivation do they have to fix it? If allowed to become pervasive, then we perpetuate the trend of an ever-growing list of unfixed bugs.
I agree with what you're saying I'm not happy about it either.
I've been around long enough now to recognize a pattern over the years and it's not a good one. Nearly 30 years in tech/software and almost 20 of that as a developer. It's not what it used to be, attitudes included.
Totally agree. I just bought a Hubitat hub because they claimed it had presence sensing.
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All of you realize that Hubitat does not own or create Presence in any form, right? Hubitat are buyers of a service. They integrate the service into their Mobile App, and give it to us "free" (aka Included)
That means any critiquing is about some external service, We all recognize that we are carrying around a Position Reporting device. Somehow, that position gets reported back to somebody's cloud, compares that to a "geofence" and reports In or Out. There's a lot of "fingers crossed" in that equation 
I happen to use the Apple presence system. I carry an iPhone and I've given it a geofence around my home. For it to work for me, my phone has to get GPS data from those orbiting satellites and report that back to Apple's cloud where it's compared to my geofence(s) and then send a cloud message to my HomeKit bridge (AppleTV) inside my home. There, I have an Automation that sets a switch to On/Off and Hubitat picks that up. Then my automations run.
For me, in my area of the planet, this works quite well. The inside edge of the geofence for my home works out to be either end of the street I live on. Sometimes the Notification hits me at the end of the street (rare), sometimes as I drive into the driveway (also rare) but most of the time, I get notified about a house away. Clearly that means there's a latency, a big one in human terms, 2 seconds average. I attribute it to the 50,000 neighbors that are also using this system.
The part Hubitat plays in my Presence automation is tiny and really reliable. It just has to see the Event generated by Apple to set a switch and then run the automations I've attached. The variance in WHEN it sees the switch change is external to Hubitat, in my case, driven by Apple's latency.
I like Presence... I want it to be an order of magnitude better than it is.. but that's a critique against others (Apple in my case.)
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Sure, but if Hubitat chose to use a service that doesn't work well that does not absolve them of the responsibility to make it work better, even if that means integrating with another 3rd party tool that works better.
I use Homekit presence exactly as you do and it's quite good.
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Extremely Subjective? This Thread is 34 users and even if that was 1% of the total Hubitat Mobile App community, then 3400 are experiencing an issue. "Spotty coverage" would be the word(s) I'd assign, knowing little else about the problem but what's in this topic and messages I've read over the past 4 years. The inverse is that it works well for 99% of those using it. The most likely outcome of changing to another service is to have the same 99%/1% but those 1% are just a different segment of users. It wouldn't change the narrative, just the authors.
I'm NOT saying Presence could be better, I'm just suggesting hyperbolic language is detectable.
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True, but since they are also committed to avoiding more invasive methods of geolocation, that might make the job harder to accomplish.
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I think they're consumers of a service - the Android or Apple location services. The location comes from the phone and is compared to the fence set in the Hubitat app configuration. A message is sent by the Hubitat app to the Hubitat cloud when the boundary is crossed. I don't think they are relying on non-Apple 3rd party services. I guess I could be wrong.
I think the fence definition lives on the device, so the comparison is done there
On iPhone the free 3rd party options of Geofency, OwnTracks, Locative all work well. They all report consistently and within margin of error between each other. And that range is consistent with Apple Home's own geofence performance.
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Apparently you did not understand what @csteele explained. At the risk of beating an apparent dead horse, let me attempt with an example that doesn't involve Hubitat.
I use OwnTracks for geolocation. OwnTracks sends my location to my own MQTT server. Sending those messages depends my phone having connectivity to the network that my MQTT server is on. If that connectivity is interrupted, then OwnTracks lets me see queued messages (they show up as a number on the OwnTracks app, with the number corresponding to the number of unsent messages).
To make my point, I decided to deliberately disable network access to my MQTT server. Within 20 minutes, I had 4 queued messages (see below). While I chose one method to interrupt access, it could have happened for many others, including all those that @csteele alluded to - satellite access, network tower access, the time-slicing algorithm used by any particular phone etc. etc.
Now replace OwnTracks with the Hubitat app. The same issues apply. The app could be generating a geo event, which never makes it out for a variety of reasons that are ALL out of Hubitat's control. And all those things could happen even with a 3rd party tool that Hubitat supports natively. Speaking of which, if you are unaware of it, there is a built-in Life360 integration.
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I'm really not here to argue, I'm just unhappy about the state of things....just 2 points and I'm tapping out of this one 
- You can't assume everybody is using HE presence so you can't talk about % users unhappy with this
- It simply doesn't work well enough and anything that needs attention should get attention
Maybe whoever runs this should find a way to poll users on the biggest pain points to set priorities. I haven't been here long but I wonder if that kind of thing has happened? This does feel like a bit of a startup and that would be amazing data for the team to have.
Absolutely agree! Who chose and continues to use the current Geofencing service that Hubitat uses?
