Android phone presence monitor haywaire

They turned this on in my community at the same time I started getting geofence issues. There are now 11 xfinitywifi wifi SSIDs within range of our house!

Are others with geofence issues in Comcast service areas?

I notice these access point vendors are Arris Group, Inc. and the BSSID of most start with 06:1D.

It may be a coincident but I can also see how it could throw off geo-coordinates. Searching the Internet doesn’t reveal anyone else with the issue, however.

Ok, for the first time since I installed my phone as a presence sensor (9 days), it failed to update accurately. At this moment, I can only assume it’s because I changed the name of my phone. As I stated previously, both my phone and my wife’s had the same name “Sony Z1s”. Last night, I changed mine to “TJ Sony Z1s” and it failed to update when I left the house this morning. Four hours later, when I checked the app, it immediately marked me as “away”. I honestly didn’t think the phone name would have an affect.

I’ll continue to monitor both phones for accuracy. This is one of the most important features and I really want it to work.

I hate getting excited about a product and can’t recommend it due to functionality issues. Also not passing the Wife Acceptance Factor :frowning:

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Piggy backing off what Ben said about moving a router and changing the SSID - there’s one more factor and that’s the MAC address. Most routers don’t let you mess with the MAC and in those cases you need to report a problem with your location using Google Maps or Apple Maps.

We have several geofence and geolocation fixes coming in Android 1.6.6 which should be out soon (tomorrow?).

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Good to hear. Thank you!

Resurrecting this thread…hoping someone can help. I began using SmartThings in mid-December with an iPhone 5 as my presence sensor. It was pretty much rock solid on location awareness and triggering my automations. Almost 2 weeks ago I switched to a Samsung Galaxy S5 and now my location services are causing me automation nightmares.

I am struggling with my phone teleporting overnight to some location about 3 miles away. So far I have not see this happen during the day or evening, seems to always start after I go to sleep and continues periodically until about 7:00 AM. This started happening at an alarming rate after I had the phone about a week, and has happened almost every night. Last night I appear to have left and arrived again 1 minute later almost every hour, and sometimes twice an hour, from 11:15 PM until 7:00 this morning. Every single time I have seen Smart Things record me leaving and arriving (although I am dead asleep in bed with the phone next to me), I can see in Google Location History that it marks me at exactly the same spot. This spot is roughly 3 miles away, is not overlapping at all with my geofence, and appears to be a residential location. One that I have never been to.

I have been able to limit the “holy crap the house just woke up” situation overnight by restricting the reaction to my arrival to all modes except my “Home Sleep”. This hasn’t fixed it all because sometimes it pulls these shenanigans while I’m getting ready for work and basically makes the house go mostly dark like I left for work. But I also have my Harmony linked into my arrival, and because THAT integration is woefully broken in SmartThings, I don’t have the same luxury of restricting to certain modes there. I have tried Harmony Hub presence detection, and IFTTT and both result in my AV system coming on and off multiple times all night. It’s getting to the point of ridiculous, and causing me to have to jump through hoops to save my sanity and my sleep. Last night I left and came back to the house (all in 1 minute, to go 3 miles away, that’s talent) NINE times.

I have tried the suggestions in this thread, but I can’t even find some of the referenced settings in my phone. I have also checked the several Android tablets I have in the house for dashboards and confirmed that none of them have been using location services, so they are not contributing. Every setting I have checked in the phone seems to suggest that WiFi will stay on even when sleeping, and I’ve double checked that I’m using the Wifi/Cell/GPS high accuracy setting. There were a number of other settings I’ve checked, but I can’t find anything that would seem to obviously cause my phone to fall off WiFi. I assume this must be what’s causing it, but it’s really hard to find information on how this stuff actually works.

Anyone else with any ideas? I realize I could spring for a presence sensor fob thing, but honestly…this should just work off the Android device the same way it did on my iPhone. I don’t want to have to drag yet one more thing around with me just to gain some semblance of control. I’ve gone from being thrilled with my entire SmartThings set up to ready to rip my hair out.

I’d like to bump this issue up as well. I also began using ST in December, and mobile phone presence on my HTC One M8 is horribly unreliable. I have “high accuracy” mode turned on for location services, yet my phone keeps mysteriously taking brief leaves of absence. At this moment in fact, I’m sitting literally 5 feet away from my wifi router and the SmartThings hub. But according to ST, I left 3 minutes ago. I have been at home, inside the house, all day, yet ST says I’ve come and gone 31 times since midnight. 31 times! I’ve been having similar issues with our son’s galaxy s4. We finally had to remove his phone as a presence sensor and add it back in again after ST noted that he left the house on Wednesday and never came back, despite being here ever since late Wednesday evening.

I have what I hope might be a critical piece of information for the developers. I have noticed that on my phone, even though I have high accuracy location mode active, when I look at the ST app under location settings, it says “Low battery use”. Unless I’m mistaken, that means it is only using wifi for location. I’ve looked under the location settings and within the ST app for a way to force it to use GPS as well, but I’ve come up empty. I have Tasker installed as well and it is using GPS for location, so why doesn’t ST?

This issue really needs some attention. I have a home alarm installed and connected to ST, but I simply can’t use it. I want it to arm when everyone leaves the house, but if it did, it would be going off throughout the day. If ST can’t get location services working on Android, and it appears that it’s been broken since at least June '14, then please stop advertising that it does and remove the feature. I’ll bite the bullet and get separate presence sensors if I have to, but that’d be a really clunky (and expensive) workaround.

The proximity to the hub doesn’t make any difference with mobile presence as it is all about geo-location using cell towers, GPS, and wi-fi networks. I don’t know what constitutes high accuracy settings but if you have wi-fi turned on it will be much better. If you have wi-fi on, I wonder if you are dropping from it for s split second from time to time.

It has been talked about in many other threads but I see possible paths for improvement as 1) allowing presence based solely on wi-fi network 2) utilizing beacons or other BLU technology to determine location 3) wait for better geo-location mechanisms built into smart phones.

Not trying to toot my horn here, but did you see my post about testing to figure out what the cause of the issue is?

A great example - my wife works from home a lot. Sometimes she turns wifi off on her phone. The way the cell towers are in our area, Find My iPhone sometimes shows her at Philadelphia International Airport, which is about 4 miles away as the crow flies (as they say). Now, she could be meeting a secret boyfriend who is a pilot for some quick rendezvous, but I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and blame it on bad triangulation.

The above error happens quite a bit when she has wifi off, but it only happens at home. When she is at work with wifi off, her location is accurate. So, I also think some of this may be problems with the data used for triangulation.

Again, the first step in troubleshooting this is process of elimination. Use something like location based reminders and see if they “fire” at the proper, or improper, times.

Personally, I have not had one issue with location on my iPhone and SmartThings since I got it…unless my internet is out or ST was down for some reason.

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Just wanted to share your frustration, but it appears to be limited to the HTC M8, or at least only specific phones. We have Nexus 5 and 6’s without any issue at all. Just replaced my daughters nexus 5 with a M8 and it is location alert hell. On top of it, even though no presence sensors are set to send notifications, we get notifications for every one for the last couple days. Tried setting the geofence delay on her account to 5 minutes, better but still horrible. One thing I thought I could try was forcing her phone to only use GPS for location, as I’m sure the issue has to do with the network triangulation, unfortunately the SmartThings app will not run with it in this mode…

Both our Nexus 5’s have been going crazy over the last few days in terms of presence detection. I’m getting pretty frustrated since I have a lot of actions/mode changes based on presence.

I’m thinking about switching to the SmartSense Presence Sensor but that’s kind of annoying. Has anyone done that and gotten a better result?

Could be better, could be worse. Individual experiences vary. See the following topic:

I have ST presence for my car and it’s working OK with the delay set to 2 mins. The only problem I have is the wait for the garage door to open because the geofence for the sensor is too small. What’s working well for me and my wife right now is virtual presence on our android phones with sharptools and tasker.

This is exactly how I feel. I really wanted the android phones to be our presence sensors but when we all are 50 miles away and all of the sudden the system unlocks our doors because it thinks we are home, you really can’t trust this with your home. I have stopped using the phones as sensors. I have almost decided to buy everyone one of the ST presence sensors

Have you all tried to use Life360 for the presence sensors on Android? I actually have combined them along with ST Presence sensors which work well in my house, and make sure that presence events only fire if both are in the area for each individual user. So far works great. No misfires due to ST or Android presence flipping in and out,

Ever since the Android 6.0 update on my Nexus 6 the location gets very inaccurate when it is in sleep mode. Maybe defaulting to the cell tower location. This still overlaps with my home location but the smartthings ap sets my presence to away. I know some people want very accurate home location for unlocking doors but it would be nice to have the option to allow a wider area or even if it overlaps.

Currently my lights turn on and off multiple times a night. etc.

I’ve been working with support via chat and email for two days. Ticket 147024. Geolocation worked great back when I had my Galaxy S6 rooted, then geolocation mysteriously quit working a couple weeks ago.

I wanted OTA carrier updates to address the ShellShock vulnerability, so I unrooted and installed my carriers vanilla 5.1.1 Lollipop OS thinking this would be a great time to get geofencing in ST working again. Wrong. There is something systemically wrong with presence detection in the Android ST app (and modifying device preferences without soft crashing, but that’s another topic).

Here’s what we/I tried addressing:

  1. Multiple devices were signed into ST with my same credentials. I had a work iPhone 5s and an iPad 4 command center signed into ST, so I signed out of everything using my account. Rebooted, re-signed into ST on my Galaxy S6, and still nothing.

  2. Made sure Location preferences within the phone’s settings was set to High (or, as Samsung renames it GPS, Wi-Fi, and mobile networks)

  3. Moved my geofence perimeter within ST to “force” a location refresh in the ST cloud/black box. No change.

  4. Made sure other location-based apps were reporting correct location (e.g. Google Maps). It is. In fact, my Blue Iris security camera system updates my geolocation just fine.

  5. Erased the ST app’s cache on my phone. No change

  6. Completely uninstalled the ST app on my phone and reinstalled. No Change.

I was anxiously hoping this week’s scheduled maintenance was going to address these Android related issues, but it didn’t. I feel bad for folks that are completely Android homes, whereas if I really wanted I could carry around my work iOS device and get by.

As indicated by my screenshots, ST knows my presence is well outside my geofence perimeter, it just doesn’t do anything as indicated by the geofence logs being all but empty. Sure, piggybacking off of a working 3rd party location plugin is a workaround, but it would serve ST right by fixing the crippling Android bugs that’ve popped up recently that are advertised as native features.

Thinking it might be something to try, I downgraded to v2.0.0, v1.7.6, and lastly v1.7.4 of the ST android app. None of which worked either, well, I guess I could take part of that back. In v1.7.x, the geofence log actually showed my GPS coordinates once in the log with an accuracy of 30m. However, I was listed as present even though my geolocation was almost exactly what my screenshot showed yesterday.

I’ve fixed it by removing all traces of my phone in the API site and readding it back to all my SmartApps. Instant success. Now if I could find a way to get all that time back :wink:

A different take on the problem:

I am in a dead zone at home - no reliable cell signal.
Therefore I cannot use GPS Presence -> No way to notify ST when I pass the fence.

My solution is to use my SSID to sense presense…with the Tasker App.

  1. SSIDNEAR = YES -> I am home…issue “I’m Back” routine.
  2. SSIDNEAR = NO -> I have left home…issue “Goodbye” routine.

Note: when the Tasker senses SSIDNEAR=NO, I will probably still be in a dead zone.
So I programmed a time loop…keep issuing GoodBye until I get a cell signal.

I also put a router extender in my garage to increase my SSID range.

It seems to work OK. My biggest issue is Airplane mode. I keep it ON at home to save battery.
But I forget to turn it off when leaving home…not the best solution.

Unrelated: I am also using Tasker to turn WiFi ON & OFF during the night to save battery.

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