Your incoming token has expired. Ha ha ha

Nic - that's brilliant!

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It's incredible to me that the task of managing multiple circles on a map, each one linked to a specific hub, and then determining whether you are in any one of them or not can be so blasted difficult. Sorry I just don't accept it. And if the solution is to set up multiple accounts or run multiple instances of the app (I have no idea how I'd even do that in parallel) then why hasn't this been thoroughly tested and then clearly communicated. The fact is, there are significant issues and related errors and no one has an answer now for months.

Frankly, I've wasted far too much time on this already. I will close out now and revisit in a month or 2 and hope the situation has dramatically improved.

Why are you bothering with the HE app for geolocation anyways? Use something else and then the Maker API cloud URL for flipping a VS. Simple and frustration free...

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Locative????????

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Arrived too late and missed all the juicy posts...lol

I think they were resisting in the early days but got a ā– ā– ā– ā–  load of flack from people for not having an app. Even though they could do everything other ways (geolocation,push notifications,dashboards) people complained that they just wanted a single app that did it all. Hence the HE app came along eventually.

Apps are hard. hah. I still struggle with it logging out automatically on me and its geolocation in somewhat dodgy. I do combine it with wifi presence so at least when I get home my alarm is disabled, But there are some days where it just doesn't recognize that I've left. I've moved by gf's phone back to life360 which is much more reliable while I suffer with the app.

Agree. I've tried many geolocation solutions on my iphones, and even found that their reliability not only differs between models but also when done on android. Life360 and Wifi Presence seems to work great for me, but others don't have the same results where as homekit presence works great for some but always gave me issues. I don't know if anybody has perfected this yet.

I've felt that way on a number of items in the beginning. Eventually I just taught myself groovy and developed all of my own solutions and drivers to work exactly like how I want them to work. This has made things much more reliable. HE is a great platform for developing your own solutions but now I get stuck having to deal with the various product issues and the little nuances that they introduce.

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Iā€™m not a developer at all, so I really donā€™t know what goes into making a geolocation app work well under the many, highly variable circumstances that users will expect to be able to use it.

But in my experience, many other apps have a lot of trouble getting it to work right, and just as important keep working well over time.

So I would not take for granted that itā€™s an easy task.

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I agree these issues are frustrating. Right now my own app has switched to the dashboard from another hub and will not switch back. Iā€™ve never been logged out but I bet itā€™s very annoying.

I will say that geolocation is hard. Hubitat isnā€™t doing well in that space but the app isnā€™t even a year old and was clearly built with the idea of the average customer having a single location. Iā€™m sure theyā€™ll improve it. But that takes time.

SmartThings has been terrible at geolocation for as long as I can remember. Life360 is good but the connector to Hubitat flakes out at times.

Iā€™ve had the best luck with HomeKit but thatā€™s not going to help if youā€™re using android.

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I donā€™t mean to be rude and Maybe Iā€™m wrong here but I think what your asking for is a pretty fringe ā€˜use caseā€™.
I wonder what percentage of users want to operate multiple homes / premises from the HE App ?

this App had some clearly defined parameters, right from the get go and ā€œMulti siteā€ was not one of them.

I get that itā€™s not working for you but I think your pushing the ability of the current App too far.

Run a poll so the devs can see how popular such a use case is as they have limited resources. :+1:t3:

I've set up 4 locations in 'Locative'.
When I arrive/leave those locations a virtual switch is turned on/off.
I then run rules on the state of those switches.
I've found Locative to be very accurate and reliable and does the job for me.
Maybe you might want to look into it.

BTW it is now not supported but it can still be found and loaded. :wink:

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Geolocation/presence detection in general is awful at this stage. It usually relies on having a smartphone, which most but not everyone does. It sucks the battery dry if you want continuous location or high accuracy. It relies on having a signal in the first place, which you cannot get in buildings like my work. Phones like my Motorola put the GPS, Wifi, and other radios into sleep mode within a couple minutes of the screen shutting off. None of this touches on the obvious privacy issues inherent with this system.

I do think Hubitat needs to do some regular "cleanup" of what they have now instead of new features or devices every update. They need to have a technical writer clean up many ambiguous or oddly worded things in both the documentation and UI.

I share your frustration at times, but then I remember it is a sub-$100 device that is one of the better or best solutions within its price class. Other hubs are not local, are going out of business, are so complex you cannot understand them, or they are so expensive most people can't/won't spend that amount of money for a "hobby".

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I agree people need to keep this in perspective.

There are other systems that are local but you're right in the two areas of more complexity and more expensive and most general hobby users won't invest the time and money to learn them or pay for them to be installed.

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I didnā€™t join until they had the app.. I had seen hubitat in the past but wasnā€™t interested.. I need the app functionality for presence and notifications... and for me the app does exactly what it is supposed to do

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I donā€™t know about Locative on Android, but I have seen some recent, somewhat regular updates of the iOS version of Locative in the Apple App Store. I was a little surprised to see these updates, but happy nonetheless. :sunglasses:

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Yes I got updates as well and was happy to see that Locative did not appear to be unsupported.

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I realize that everyone's needs are different but personally, I find Pushover, Life 360, and Hubitat cloud dashboards provide a substantially better experience than the Hubitat app does. Pushover is $5 and allows Low, Normal, and Emergency notifications. Life 360 is free and while it isn't perfect it works well enough for me.

As others have already mentioned, it's important to remember that the Hubitat principals weren't eager to provide an app and reluctantly decided to do so because of the amount of bitching they got for its absence. I installed it when it first came out and quickly realized that they were right; it isn't needed and actually add very little value.

I mean absolutely no disrespect with this question but in the grand scheme of things, think of all of the things Hubitat does really well. Is it worth walking away for the annoyances of the app when there are other ways to achieve the same (or better) end result?

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I was going to suggest something similar as a workaround to the problem. Instead of accessing Dashboard through the mobile app, get the local or cloud link (or both) from Dashboard child app in the admin UI, and access that from your device instead. You can bookmark it in your browser or add the link directly to your main/home screen--something that we used to joke was enough to trick some people into thinking there was an app. :slight_smile: ("We" meaning people who have been on the platform for longer than there has been a mobile app. The app added no features to my setup. It just allowed me to consolidate some things I was doing in different ways before--notifications via a third-party solution and presence, which I never 100% rely on in an app/system, from HomeKit to HomeBridge to Hubitat into just Hubitat).

I'm not saying the app shouldn't work better and certainly understand the problems. But I am saying that I don't see it is as a priority for them (it works well enough for most people who only have one hub), so I'd recommend exploring alternatives as mentioned above. Many of us have been doing other things for a long time, and the platform itself still supports some of these natively (e.g, Pushover and Life360) with community workarounds for some other things (HomeBridge) and roundabout ways to do things in Hubitat (Alexa-based presence, for example), depending on what you need. Making the core platform stable and functional is likely a higher priority for staff and definitely something I happen to get a lot more use out of.

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I chatted with the dev a while ago. He's once again supporting the iOS version. The android version is dead much like every other location service app on android. Google's constant changing of the libraries and api's and constantly breaking functionality drove most location app developers away.

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Ditto. Going from that combo to the app would be a big step backwards for me/in my opinion.

@Angus_M, maybe keep an eye on this thread also [RELEASE] Life360 Tracker - Works with the Paid and Free versions of Life360!
It sounds like Brian is cooking up a "must have" app for Android users. :slight_smile:

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