I am experiencing an issue that happens with the garage door that I have been intending to post but until today, it wasn’t such a big deal. I have it set up that when my phone arrives home, my garage door opens. If I come home while speaking on my phone, it does not recognize my iphone as a presence sensor. When I hang up, even if it is an hour later and I am already inside my house, my garage door opens. Today, I was carrying things in and didn’t realize that i left the door to the garage open. My kittens got out in the garage. I didn’t think much of it figuring I would get them back in the house when they got hungry. Well, not so. I am so pissed and nearly heartbroken that I might have lost my kittens. I just spend over an hour trying to get my tiny black kittens back into my house in the dark becuase the garage door opened while I was in the house. The kittens have never been outside and they were so afraid they kept running away further down the street towards traffic. I was so afraid that my kittens would get hurt or killed for such a stupid oversight with this platform. I am so fed up that I am debating not even using ST anymore. I guess I have to turn off this feature until they figure it out but why even use this if not for the convenience of not having to sit in front of my house while my garage door opens.
Verizon, and iPhone 5 or older? Yep, no voice and data at the same time.
Good news is that iPhone 6 does finally do voice and data concurrently on Verizon.
Oh No, that is very terrible! Poor kittens! That’s such a terrifying situation to be in for both you and the kittens. I’m so very glad to hear they’re safe though.
As @minollo has mentioned, that might have been more of a phone/verizon feature (or lack there of) than it is ST. I’m curious to know : Do you have an iPhone6? If so, that shouldn’t be the case, but if it is, I’d like to bring it to their attention.
If I recall, however, VoLTE does not work everywhere. I believe towers need to be updated to support it.
You also need to make sure your settings are updated as well. Settings…Cellular…Enable LTE. At least, that tis where it is on an AT&T iPhone.
My phone does recieve texts thru my wifi while I am on the phone while at home so I don’t think this is the issue. I can hear texts coming in while talking so why wouldn’t the phone also serve as a presence sensor while talking?
Oh no! That’s not good at all.
I also have my garage door set up to open when I arrive home. It’s not perfect, sometimes I get home and have to wait 10-30 seconds or click a button on my iPhone6 to wake it up and report.
I also have the garage door send me a push notification if its been open for more than a half hour. This notification has helped me out at least half a dozen times. I also have plans on making a simple app that closes the garage door after a certain amount of time, but I have to think about the rules around that. I don’t want the garage door to close while I’m working in the garage!
If your phone is connected via wifi, you’re using two different radios, and you would be able to accomplish that. Not all peoples have wifi in their driveway, and not all people have wifi period! If you don’t have wifi connected and you’re talking on the phone, that radio is sometimes used up with the phone conversation and not available for data on certain carriers and phone models.
My phone works great as a presence sensor…as long as I am not speaking on it. As soon as i leave the cul de sac, it reports I have left home and as soon as I turn onto my street, it detects I am home and opens my garage door so by the time i drive past 4 houses and get to mine, my garage door is fully open. My wifi range is great and I can use it even in the street in front of my house. I also have an alert set to tell me if my garage door is open for more than 6 minutes, which is how I realized my kittens were outside but by then, it was too late. I will contact support but I don’t expect much. Everytime I report something now, they say they are working on it and it will be fixed with the next release…and nada…I already disable the automatic garage door opener and will certainly be more careful about closing the door or maybe I will not talk on the phone while arriving home…ST was supposed to make my life easier and it has not really turned out that way.
@minollo @April
I have an iphone 5S. I thought that verizon did not have voice and data at the same time but then a few months ago, i realized i was getting texts while on the phone driving so perhaps that has changed. Even so, I was within my home wifi range so I must assume that the iphone as a presence sensor only works via cellular and not wifi since the phone was occupied. This means that phones only function as a presence sensors while not speaking on them. is this a known issue? if so, why not disclose this info…perhaps when setting up your phone as a presence sensor in the app?
I can only share my observations here, as I don’t have any affiliation with ST.
If your phone is connected to wifi, it doesn’t really matter if you are talking or not; the ST app on your iphone is notified by iOS that the geofence has been crossed (I wonder if some older iphone’s don’t run GPS while on a call… I never tried), and the ST app notifies ST cloud about that; which in turns triggers the various applications tied to presence. The same happens if you are not connected to wifi, but if you can use cellular data (which, for older iphone’s, it implies not being on a voice call).
Wifi connections often don’t reach/are weaker in driveways; and/or devices take a little while to connect to them. So, if the ST app cannot rely on cellular data (for whatever reason), it seems to be reasonable that the presence change notification is sent to ST cloud only after either cellular data becomes available or after wifi is active (whichever comes first); I would be surprised if the ST app makes any attempt to even understand whether it’s relying on cellular data or wifi. That behavior seems to be consistent with my experience.
Has anyone had any issues with turning your phone off and back on in the house and ST thinking you have left/arrived and closes/opens the door unexpectedly?