Also, you need to use something like a reminder because that is a “background application”. If you are using a maps application and it is showing accurate location AND your reminder does not fire, then you know there is some background issue happening…which means ST would most likely have the same issue since it is also a background app.
You are correct about the reboot. As for the carrier, bot my wife and I have the same carrier, but she has an iPhone and I have an Android. Hers works perfectly every time she hits the geofence. I guess I need to re-add myself to ST and see if mine works better after a restart!
I’ve done that, reboot my phone.
Right now I registered only my android to be a presence sensor, and one SmartSense presence sensor.
When I am away from, I always turn on my GPS, if I’m not using driving navigation, my GPS location is based on mobile signal carrier, when I need more accurate, I set GPS to high accuracy mode which use GPS with around 3-5 meter accuracy.
I was able to access my ST normally, all system work well, my switch work very responsive.
But still, ST say I’m home
DO you have an app that will pop-up a message when you arrive home that is not ST? Time to test if it is a background issue. On an iPhone, I would recommend people use the stock Reminder app. Not familiar enough with Android to know equivalent functionality.
I think once you can narrow down that it is not your phone, you have a lot of information to pass to ST support and have done most of the troubleshooting steps already.
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Yes, I have that app for push notification when either my phone or my presence sensor is arrive or leave my home.
My presence sensor works fine, give me notification when presence sensor away from my home.
the accuracy and respond is great, I can trust the presence sensor to lock/unlock my door 
Actually, I meant an app other than ST. Basically, want to see if the location thing affects other background apps on your phone. Like in my iPhone example, the Reminders app would be running in the background and would have triggers based on arriving and leaving home.
oohh,…
I didn’t have another app like ST to report my location or geofence
Presence sensor was working great until my phone upgraded to Android 5.0. I used to be able to come home, and without the ST app even open, the lights would turn on as it was supposed to. Since Android 5.0 installed, it won’t do that anymore. So, when I get home, and the lights don’t come on, as soon as I open ST, all of the sudden it realizes I’m home and the lights come on. My location services are on all the time so the phone itself always knows where it is. Is there a fix for Android 5.0 users in the works?
Sorry, I have not upgraded to 5.0. I am still running 4.4.4. However, it does not report its location to ST. I have removed the phone and readded. I have shut it down and restarted. I have turned on GPS Location and turned it back on. Nothing seems to work.
It doesn’t solve the core issue with presence on the SmartThings mobile app, but if you are a tinkerer you might be interested in using Tasker + SharpTools to build a custom presence solution on Android. At the very least, you might consider using Tasker to provide the notification when you are in an out of your geofence to serve as a validation similar to the iOS reminder in Brian’s example.
As I have noted in other threads, the linked example uses WiFi to keep things simple, but I would usually recommend a multifaceted location solution like AutoLocation which takes into account WiFi + Cellular + GPS.
My mobile presence was working like a charm until about a week ago. Since then the mobile will “Present at home” when I am not or stay away when I return. In case of the latter, the only way I can get the mobile back to “Present” is to “Tap to edit home location on map” and without making any changes, click “Save”.
I have pretty much taken the path suggested by Joshua. I already had a tasker profile that changed phone setting depending on where I was (home or away) and just added SharpTools to the mix. Initially, that approach did not work any better mostly because of the way I set it up (Tasker-Sharptools turned on ST switch which triggered something which triggers something). Since then I have “simplified” what ST needs to do when I leave/return. Using Tasker/Sharptools I set the appropriate phase in ST and all is well everytime all the time
Biggest hurdle was overcoming the return and depending on time of day, which phase (& susequenly which mode) to set… Needed to implement sunset/sunrise routine within tasker to solve that problem.
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Just wanted to share that at least for Android the issues appear to be phone specific not Android OS Version Specific. I have had a Nexus 5 and Nexus 6, both on latest Android 5.0+ with 0 issues with Location. Replaced one of the Nexus 5’s with an HTC One M8, and it has been location issue hell. (Running 4.4 or 5.0).
One thing I noticed is that the SmartThings Android App refuses to let you run it when in GPS Only mode…pretty sure this would solve my issues on the M8, but unfortunately it will not allow you to.
I’m still researching if its possible, but my next idea is a custom presence sensor that somehow checks if the device is still on the local network.
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You could use SharpTools + Tasker to do this:
I am going to use the virtual presence sensor Idea, but I’ve had similar location issues with Tasker / AutoLocation in the past, just not reliable all the time. Since we only use Android and always have WIFI on, I am going to use that as a baseline. Only check for ping response when ST thinks someone has left.
My presence would often change in the middle of the night when my android Samsung S4 phone was sitting on my table. I increased the size of the geo fence to about 1 mile and it has been working reliably at all times home and away ever since. I think the location on my phone was not accurate enough at various times as it switched from LTE to wifi and/or lost gps signal.
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So if I am sitting on my couch with NO WIFI on and my front door unlocks because I have “arrived” or “left” and then I pull my phones map app and it knows, that I am not only at home, but it knows where I am on my first floor level (pretty damn impressive considering I live in a wooded area); then what can attribute the issue too? I have an Android device which I also use for Geocaching where I have NO WIFI connectivity and I often leave if turned off and yet it gets me to with in 10 feet of caches nearly every single time and in some fairly dense woods or concrete structures. Again we read that blaming the phone is mostly like the route to take, but in my experience with using the GPS functionality of my phone in hooby that relies on it whole heartedly without errors blaming the phone make NO sense at all. Also, if this is an issue across many phone platforms and versions of those phones, the common denomiator is the ST APP/Services. I recomended ST to friends of ours and the wearable prescenece sensor tags work great for both us, but the phones cause our garage doors and their automatic gate to open sporadically. How secure is that? The WIFI doesn’t make any difference in whether or not this fires off sporadically, whether it’s on or off I get similar results and even though my phone knows exactly where I am. I have tested it and even in places where I know I don’t have a good GPS signal and phone DOES NOT know where I am, it doesn’t make ST fire off and unlock my doors and leave my house open, which I was told would be the case if my phone DIDN’T know where I was. I have done this with WIFI ON and OFF and with MOBILE DATA ON and OFF and with GPS ON and OFF and a all combinations of those. There’s a glitch and through all of the steps I have taken to troubleshoot it, aside from stepping through any verbose logs on the phone and home unit, the basic logs show randomness, as does my friends. Again the common denominator is the App/Service. I am leaving the hub out as it works great for eveything from prescence tags to lights and outlets to opening gates when told too. It recieves commands fine and acts on them as it should. The problem seems to come from the ST App knowing where it is and transmitting that to the “cloud service” to send to the Home Hub. Perhaps it’s NOT the app and it in fact DOES know where I am, but somewhere between the app obtaining GPS location Data and the down connection side to the hub from the cloud service there appers to be a glitch. Again using the app to conrol other devices works fine, so it has to with obtaining GPS data on the phone to sending it to a cloud service and translates that into hub commands.
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Disclaimer: I don’t currently have an ST enhanced home, but I’m excited about getting an ST Hub 2 when they are available and automating my house. I am however an IT professional and a Google Maps junkie.
One of the things I’m looking forward to is presence triggered actions, using mobile devices. Unfortunately I am intimately familiar with the inaccuracies of mobile device location accuracy. One of my job duties is to survey wifi signal strength of ships. I do this by traveling to wherever the ship is, and walking around it with special software running on my laptop measuring signal strength. Due to the way Google (and others) identify where a mobile device is based on wifi signals, if the wifi signal is recorded, then the source of the signal moves and the location is not updated, any device attempting to figure out where itself is will be WRONG. The process of updating the location of the signal source is automated and Google doesn’t talk much about it. It’s also inconsistent and sporadic.
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In this image http://i.imgur.com/KKKBgVI.png I was in Jacksonville, FL, performing a survey on a ship which apparently had been in France, Spain, and Puerto Rico recently, as the wifi access points were geotagged by Google as being in those locations. Likely no one in this discussion is having this exact issue, but it is a way to show how profoundly wrong location information from your phone can be. These points are all from a single day.
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In this image http://i.imgur.com/QEStSva.png from the same trip on a different day I apparently had the wifi on my phone disabled. Even with wifi disabled on my phone, my phone still thought it was jumping back and forth across the river as it picked up various different cell towers while I moved around the ship. This issue is far more likely to be happening for people in this thread.
To be continued …
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Continued …
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In my own home http://i.imgur.com/DLiHfn0.png my phone seems to pick up my neighbors’ wifi occassionally and think it’s quite far from the house. I can assure you I’ve never been in my neighbor’s backyard, though they do have a very nice pool.
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In this image http://i.imgur.com/GahUVcS.png I was in Barcelona, Spain. I believe this image covers about 5 days of location tracking. You can see similar zig zags down in the water area from my phone’s location jumping around there, and again in the upper left corner (we had a day off to site-see; Barcelona is AMAZING).
I’m having trouble finding good examples from my Google Maps Location History, but I’ve also had instances while backpacking in National Forests where my phone was operating purely on GPS that the recorded location was wildly inaccurate.
This is why your phone wants to have cellular, wifi, and GPS enabled all the time. The more sources of radio frequency it has the better chance it can determine where it actually physically is, and provide you more useful information.
In conclusion! … I strongly suggest that anything you want your automated home to do based on your phone’s location be monitored very closely with lots of alerts being sent to you about unlocking doors and raising the garage door(s) until you’ve done ample troubleshooting. I think that the first thing to do is for the process of determining that your device is “away from home” would be to; on first identification of device away from home start a timer (2 to 10 minutes?) if it’s determined to be away from home again after those 10 minutes THEN trigger events. In typical usage when my phone falsely reports my location it’s a one-off, or at least not continuously wrong over a long period. Certainly in my work travel the location is often fubar over several hours.
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Is there not a way that ST can create a rule that says: if your phone is
connected to your home Wifi then do not allow it to leave the house?
People have been asking for this for a long time. I got tired of waiting so I did it myself on my android phone a few months back using Tasker. I surfed around on this website to find out how. In the end I created a virtual presence switch for Smartthings, then Tasker sends it commands to turn on or off via HTTP post commands. The virtual switch, in turn, changes modes from present to away or back.
My phone was unreliable on its own in giving the location. I had a Samsung Galazy that was rock-solid, but when I upgraded to a Moto-X sometimes it would place me a mile or more away. And I had the accurate location turned on. But creating a Tasker profile that only marked me as away when I was outside the GPS fence and not near my home wifi solved the problem.
Not sure why Smartthings hasn’t added this, it seems like it would be trivial to do.
I tried mobile phone presence on my Android phone, and didn’t like it. So I thought I removed it. But I get an annoying message telling me that “Your Mobile presence device will not work without location enabled” (or something close to that. How do I get rid of mobile presence completely on this phone?