I have been looking for some documentation on or explanation of how presence detection works in HE. I have created a virtual presence device for both myself and my wife. I works...sort of.... and I know there are issues with geo fencing. Still, I don't know how this picks up our presence. I do have the Life 360 app installed. I also have my Android phone as a device but it seems to never show me present. Can anyone point me to some good documentation on how this is SUPPOSED to work in the first place? Thanks.
Personally I use a a combination of @johnc7's ip presence and @joelwetzel's combines presence. (keeping it local. don't wanna rely on the internet) My wife and I use our phones as presence devices and then we have a couple of fob's on our key chain's. At least 1 of the fobs and both of the phones need to be out of the house as a condition for an away trigger. (This is so that if only one of us leaves the house that all the lights don't turn off). So the condition is our phones aren't pingable on the local network and 1 or 2 of the fobs are gone and all lights go out and doors are locked if unlocked (and if doors are unlocked we get a message saying we were dumbasses for leaving it unlocked). Now geofencing works with the gps in your phone to tell life360 or your hubitat app that you're within a set radius of your hub. Once the condition of your radius is met (lets say a 1/4 mile as the crow flies) your hub knows it's in the vicinity and triggers lets say particular lights to come on, your door to unlock before getting to it, and the heat increased 5 degrees. When you leave that radius, you can trigger any on lights to go out, your door locks, and the heat goes down to save energy while you're at work all day. (obviously that's an example. I mean you could wire a trigger to shock the dog with a z-wave relay and some wires when you're within that radius, but hey... 
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I'm just using the hubitat app on mine and the wifes phones and it's pretty reliable. More so than smartthings was.
In the app, you have to tell it where "home" is on the map and drag the pin. It's a little tricky. You can zoom to make the circle bigger or smaller.
Your phone knows via GPS that you are within the circle of being home, and sends the the status to the hub from the cloud.
I did some testing by setting up notifications so I can see when it detects we're home/away. It's usually within a minute or two.
Important, on android you need to set the phone not to optimize battery usage for the hubitat app.
So.. when the HE mobile app is installed on a phone then the phone reports to HE when it enters or leaves the zone you have set up as long as the phone is not set to optimize battery usage. For my wife's phone to do the same I just need to install the mobile app on it. That explains for me how the HE hub knows we are present or not. If this works reliably then I probably don't need the Life 360 app on my HE. I pretty much understand what we can do with presence detection once it is working. I like the concept of keeping as much as I can within HE and not using internet based services unless absolutely necessary. No way around that if I use the phones for presence detection I guess.
Thanks for the response.
where can i find out about ip presence?
Download it through the hubitat package manager
One of the reasons I use combined presence. I have a few ST presence fobs we keep on keychains. It works very well...
Correct. Mostly all mobile presence apps will need to use mobile data.
I played around with using my unifi to detect when our phones were connected to wifi but it was a little laggy and not as reliable.
The other plus of having the hubitat app on both your phones is you can send notifications to them. For example, my front door lock sends the wife and I both a notification whenever to door is unlocked, and unlocked by what code.
Another one reminds us to close the refrigerator door (temp/motion sensor in the fridge).
