Android Pie Bugs, location being one

Public service announcement for those who may upgrade to Pie. I reached out to support since my daughter’s Nokia 6.1 on Pie had basically stopped working for presence entirely. I tried all the standards like rebooting, signing out, uninstalling, resetting Geo location, checking accuracy setting, removing and readding as sensor before I reached out and the first answer was check location accuracy. Below is the second answer. I’m still not convinced it’s the issue as it magically started working again (for now) as well as I’m pretty sure the issue started before the upgrade. It’s my daughter’s phone so I’m not entirely sure when she upgraded.

“At this time the SmartThings app does not fully support Android 9.0 os. You may be able to download and install the app but you will experience a variety of bugs. This seems to be one of them. We are working on bringing full compatibility to Android 9.0 but at this time the patch isn’t yet complete.”

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Yes I noticed after going to a Pixel 2 XL that location sucks. It has been very reliable for years. I now have to go onto WiFi when I get home and open the ST app. After it populates my arrival routine executes from immediately to 5-10 minutes later.
I run a presence sensor OR’d with my phone so I’m usually good. Unfortunately my presence sensor is in my car which is off site being repaired so the coming and going has sucked for a while.

Try setting the following apps to “Not Optimized”: SmartThings, Fused Location, & Presence. Do this by going to Settings > Apps & Notifications > See all apps (enable “show system” from the menu), select one of the above apps, go to Advanced > Battery > Battery Optimization.

Also, make sure the same apps aren’t restricted. Check that by going to Settings > Battery > Adaptive Battery > Restricted Apps. Or disable adaptive battery.

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Personally I have everything wide open for ST. I have to do this before Pie when Oreo was putting things to sleep as a default.

Thanks, I just did that and will see if it helps. I didn’t see a presence app but I did it for fused. Was already done for ST. Her phone also stopped working this afternoon so early was still an issue.

This has been an issue since the early days of Android 8, because of the aggressive battery optimizations.

Nowadays it’s worse, to the point that you get DAYS worth of battery life at the expense of background updates for things like location.

The WiFi-based “Presence Sensor” smartapp that’s floating around actually works fairly well with my Pixel on Android 9, so that might be an option worth looking at.

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Is that app on the play store or somewhere in this forum? I actually might shut off ST location and try IFTTT to trigger her location.

Well, didn’t make a difference. Worked for several hours then froze. I gave up on ST and tried to rig something up with IFTTT and it did the same thing. Worked for about half a day then stopped. Guess it might be a bug with her phone. Very frustrating.

I guess it’s possible… in my case (so far) it’s working pretty well. I’ve had I think two instances where my phone disconnected from the network and would have been flagged as “away” but I’ve tried to compensate for that using WebCore.

As it stands, I have the whole setup sort of on probation right now, and I have a WebCore piston that marks me as not present if I stay disconnected from the network for more than 90 seconds. This seems to get rid of the issues I’ve had with teleporting away / home / away / home at random times.

Can you point me to where you found the wifi presence app? I can’t seem to find it. I was thinking about doing the same thing with IFTTT.

Sorry for the delay.

It’s this app here: https://community.smartthings.com/t/release-improved-mobile-presence-android-only