Goodbye constantly triggering because it keeps thinking my iPhone left

For some reason, today my smartthings thinks my iphone is away. It keeps setting my house to away and i haven’t left all day. If i go into the app and look at the presence icon for my phone and it will show it as away. Refreshing it will make it realize it is here. Anyone have a solution?

Mobile presence is problematic for some – to say the least.

I’ve been having problems with my wife’s Android phone since day 1, where it constantly reports incorrect state (away / home) for no obvious reason. We were just away for 3 days and ST shows that she’s been at home, even though it properly reported on my status.

Some people suggest using Life360 as an alternative method for presence tracking, although I refuse to install yet another app to do what ST should be doing properly in the first place :slight_smile:

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Making sure your phone is using both wi-fi and cellular networks tends to improve things, as does making sure GPS services and the SmartThings app are setup to run in the background.

It has been using both. Like I said, this was not previously an issue, it started affecting me on Sunday. I wasn’t sure if anyone had a rememdy to this problem.

So i have new information related to this issue. The only thing that had changed on that day is that I had hooked up my ps4. So I unhooked it and the problems seem to go away. But wasn’t 100% if that was the only change because i made a few other adjustments. I just hooked my PS4 up again and it immediately set my phone to away. It is now jumping back and forth between away and home. Has anyone else experienced this or does anyone have any idea what wireless signals the PS4 could be broadcasting that would affect my iphone like this?

We have seen signal interference from game consoles before as well as Apple TV’s and other devices. Here is a writeup that one of our lead engineers wrote a short time ago that can serve to illustrate some of the signal issues facing us all:

Mostly this was interference that we saw affecting the ZigBee and Z-Wave signals, though. It is interesting that you believe your phone could be impacted.

Well the presence tile says my phone is away (not blue). This is may be more of a problem of somehow the ps4 is making my iphone thinking it is in a different GPS location. After my phone said i went away I went into maps and it showed me about a city block away from my actual location. Has anyone seen this kind of behavior?

I have increased the radius of my home to encompass the distance. But i would still be interested if anyone has any ideas for why this is happening.

I’ve seen similar things when moving Wi-Fi access points around. The phone uses the access points it can see to help pin down your location. If an access point was moved recently, it will suddenly think it is where the AP was previously. I’ve seen a phone near an AP that was moved from FL to MO flip back and forth as it came in and out of range. A PS3 or PS4 that is set up for remote access will act as an AP. I wonder if that is what is happening? Eventually the geolocation system will learn where the AP is now and the problem will go away.