Mobile Presence Question

Hello everyone. This question might be more directed at SmartThings, but I was wondering if anyone knows of anything that may have changed in the last week in regards to mobile presence? Prior to this week, my status changes took an extremely long time to change. Now starting I think late Sunday or Monday, presence has been working great. One thing I want to point out is that it isn’t just one mobile presence, but two that I noticed this on. Just wondering if something was changed or what?

Thanks,
Jeff

Mine has actually been working worse. I’m always present now. Are you on iOS or Android?

iOS. Wish presence wasn’t such a pain in the butt!

I don’t know if this may have any bearing, but i am an iOS user. if you have WiFi turned off, your positional accuracy is very low. If I have WiFi off on my iPhone It will think I am present even if I am a mile away. Our solution in my home is to combine both the presence sensor on a key tag and mobile presence sensor. So if I am out for a run and don’t take my key-chain with me, it still can register that I am gone.

I recently noticed this same exact thing. Confuses me a bit as I don’t understand why that changes it so much, even if you are not connected to a wifi network…

Its because of the mobile logic. There are some limitations with GPS. With current system the big limitation power and the accuracy offered by limited GPS antenna visibility of satellites. In order to get a precise location the GPS needs visibility to a number of satellites - the more satellites you can see the better your accuracy can be determined. To do that, your phone has to search for satellites. In urban areas, you don’t always have a good line of sight to those satellites. To make up for those limitations they use WiFi and databases of known SSID locations to pinpoint you to a fine level of detail.

Thats why without WiFi enabled, your phone has much more limited location accuracy.

It just never works reliably, and has been that way forever. I think of it more as making my phone into a fob rather than a presence device, since I can never count on it working. My routine now is to drive to work, pick up the phone, notice the icon is not there saying my mode has been changed to away, then opening the app and changing my setting to away by hand. Which, BTW, takes more steps than it ought to because if the last screen I was on is the one with the box “Change mode and more” it never responds to a selection so I need to navigate away from it and back.