Might be a redundant question but I honestly can’t find an answer to this anywhere. In order to use my phone as a presence sensor, do I have to have the ST app open on my Android phone for it to detect my presence? I have tried it both ways but it just isn’t working. I know I have location services/GPS on as I arrive, and the geofence is setup for my home location, but no luck so far.
Phone presence doesn’t work for me either. It’s not clear when or why it changes state.
So I have a Samsung Galaxy S5 and it works just fine without having the location services turned on. However, my wife has a Galaxy S3 and it doesn’t detect her as having left even with GPS turned on. I think I’ll need to try removing her and adding again.
My irregular phone is also an S3 - so there’s that
I predict removing and adding makes no difference - tried that.
Any luck with this? My phone is a Samsung S5 and it took ST 1 and 1/2 hours to detect I had left home. My wife has the same phone and she has been gone for 5 hours and it still says that she is home.
After reluctantly doing a factory reset of the phone, the presence feature started working, but not immediately. The first try, I had the WiFi and GPS enabled, but the lights didn’t trigger. The second time, it did, but only when it detected my WiFi network, and it only turned on one of my lights when it should have triggered 3. Finally, on about the 3rd try, it seems to trigger my 3 lights once I am in the geofence and before it detects my WiFi. Now everything seems to work as advertised. I also added an Ecobee thermostat and it also works once presence is detected. You can still use the scheduler that Ecobee provides, and the ST smartapps will still work by overriding whatever you programmed into Ecobee. For example, if I set the Ecobee scheduler to turn off my heater at 8am every day, but decide to leave a 1/2 hour early, ST will cut off my thermostat (which is what I want).
I think it is also important to know that I also use the Waze traffic app when I drive, so the GPS is always in use and exposed to the window as I drive, so that probably helps.
My Galaxy S3 works the best, the Galaxy S5 in the home sometimes gets stuck and usually one of the following fixes it, opening the ST app, toggling the location or rebooting the phone clears it up. We also have an older HTC Evo 4G LTE which works wells but sometimes the ST app needs to be opened to awake the presence. We leave GPS with high accuracy on for all the devices and if you have any sort of battery improving app which closes apps out on its own, it could be closing ST app and be causing the issue.