What's your backup solution if Life360 let us really down?
I had used Life360 connector along with the iPhone Wi-Fi presence sensor and the Hubitat presence sensor combined as a virtual presence sensor for a few years. When the Life360 Connector quit working I switched to the Life360+ for about a week. Now it no longer works.
Am real interested in other alternatives and looking for suggestions since the Life360 was the primary functional presence sensor.
I am am an novice so would appreciate as detailed directions as possible.
Thanks,
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More so that they have Cloudflare hosting backend and opted to use their bot detection...from how I understand it. If it was catching 100%, we'd be done already. When their system does detect activity, it prompts the e-mail I posted earlier.
I have not yet received the email, but cannot log in with my cell un-verified and logged out...
Take a look at
Alexa and Google home both utilizing virtual switches. Alexa more reliable of the two but I use both for redundancy.
The Hubitat app which works great for Android members of the family but is not very reliable for iOS.
HD+ app is a real winner for the Android (no iOS support) members of my family. Especially since they all have Samsung devices which @jpage4500 really has dialed in. Thanks Joe!
Smartthings arrival sensors w/battery hack in cars of iOS users. Should have bought more in hind sight.
iOS users with a homekit hub should look into using it's presence detection. I don't personally but have seen many posts in this community regarding it. Seems to be very solid.
Don't let the name fool you. It supports android as well. Static IPs a must.
Life360 was the rock though. It was (maybe still could be) the most reliable for both iOS and Android. Really like how @jpage4500 worked it into HD+ too.
I'm using combined presence app to work all the methods into one. I don't remember which one though and I modified it somewhere along the line.
As for Life360, even if I lose integration, my family will still use it for now. I'd love to let my feet do the talking since they've turned their backs to the smarthome niche but I'm not up to converting them all to OwnTracks at the moment.
This community has a wealth of info/ideas on presence detection for those who may not have done a deep dive yet. The general consensus has been for some time that there is no single bulletproof solution, thus using multiple layered methods has been a route many like myself use.
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@esanders1969 can you log back in on your phone? If not, it's because Life360 reset your password, If you can, are you using the most recent version of Life360+ (3.0.25)?
Losing Life360 eventually, unless they listen to their customers (I wrote them a note a few weeks back which seems to have been ignored) is unfortunate. We'll probably all need to move to other solutions.
But why can't the Hubitat mobile app be a reliable presence sensor? We don't need all the fancy LIfe360 features in the end. We need the existing Hubitat iOS & Android app to work reliably.
Why can't that happen? The limited functionality we need, a reliable presence sensor based on GPS & Wifi connectivity should be a tablestake of the platform. It shouldn't have to be augmented with third-party presence providers.
Sure Life360 (through 360+ and previous incarnations) offers some really cool features but in the end, I just need my hub to know I am arriving or leaving and whether others are so as to turn on/off HSM and run other automations
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From what I've read about this stuff, it sounds like Apple and Google intentionally make this difficult (for lack of a better term) so that 3rd-parties don't abuse tracking and thusly crush battery life and OS resources. Sort of like how the military can tweak GPS's CEP at will -- they hold all those cards.
Bigger/specialized companies like L360 have the resources & bandwidth to better "keep up" with how Apple & Google tweak that access, but smaller clients (presumably Hubitat) who don't have the bandwidth to dedicate resources solely to this effort end up just doing the best they can - so it sometimes works better than other times.
Sounds like an excuse, to be honest. At this point, the APIs are well known and documented both on iOS and Android and hundreds of apps track location for different purposes. I am sure they can find a specialized consultant to address the issue. I don't know if HomeAssistant's presence is much better but its mobile apps are opensource (ios for example)
I get that Hubitat is unlikely to have dedicated mobile developers and is likely to outsource that work but as a tablestake, they should make sure that functionality is reliable.
EDIT, moreover, the Hubitat mobile app doesn't need to communicate with Hubitat most of the time, it could store the n locations that you have a hub at (1 for most people) and with every mobile location change, calculate whether it's left or arrived at one. So the impact on battery should be minor.
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This is what I do/or what I did as well. I did all of the stuff you mentioned in your post. Connecting to WiFi, Google Home, Smartthings arrival sensors (long time ago - I have a lot of them, currently they "sleep" in boxes at my attic), Hubitat native, and so on. Nothing worked almost so reliable like the combination of HD+ and Life360.
Now I have to look for a combination beside HD+ I've never used before. Life360 + HD+ was such a solid solution.
sent you a DM.
I agree. If Owntracks can work, which I believe is developed by a small group, it should be possible to dedicate some resources to make Hubitat app work.
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I think it's a valid request but one that does unfortunately require a lot of resources and evolves over time. I haven't worked on iOS in years so I can't talk about it -- but I have done a lot of Android development and it just takes time to really figure out the best way to get geofencing to work reliably.
Yes, there's some well known API's -- but they just don't work reliably across all devices. There's lots of reasons for this.. some of them relating to the OS just trying to maximize device battery at the cost of delaying notifying an app when you enter or exit a geofence. I believe that's why Hubitat's app doesn't work as reliably as most of us would like.
I ended up writing my own presence feature in HD+ and it's been working reliably for me over the past few years. I can't think of a time when I've left home (with my phone) and haven't gotten a notification that my Hubitat went into 'armed away' mode. I did this not just with a geofence API but using other API's like Activity Detection, charging detection, connection (cellular/wifi) detection. It took weeks of testing to get it to work with my devices and that doesn't mean it'll work great with some other device manufacturer either.. and of course it doesn't work with iOS so I don't recommend it as a solution for most -- I just happen to use an Android phone.
Anyway, this would probably be better served in another thread just comparing the various options out there -- ie: Hubitat vs Life360 vs OwnTracks vs ??; I'm sure some already exist.
For Life360, I'm hopeful there's enough interest in Life360 that someone will figure out another way to support logging in...
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HELP? Can you explain to me how to use HD+ as a presence sensor for Hubitat? I just installed to use as a replacement of Life360 presence. It's just an Android App, no device is created in Hubitat to monitor, that I can find. What am I missing? Thank you if you are able to help.
check in this thread...
You'll find everything you need to know.
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The HD+ thread is here
and on the first post you can find the link to the Presence Tracking @jpage4500 built here:
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So I have tried every tip to log in to the app that I have found and every attempt results in the dreaded "Connection Error: 403". While trying to ensure that my phone/email & password were correct I logged in into both the phone app and the life360 website and noticed that I was never asked for a password, they simply sent me a confirmation code to use. Am I trying to use the wrong credentials to log into Life360+? Is it not phone/email & password anymore?
If it's asking for a code, 2FA has been turned on. You won't be able to log in using that acct. You can try resetting the password. Some users have reported that it turns the 2FA back off but I don't know that for sure.
Oh...that would explain things. Any idea how I might have turned that on? I don't recall doing it, could another member of the family have done it for everyone?
Well, resetting my password did not help. Funny thing is I had a userid/password option on the phone app until I verified my phone number and then it disappeared. I think my wife is the admin on the "family" group, I'll check her phone to see if there's an option for 2FA. Thanks for the tip.
