@kelleytoons Oh it’s not an old issue. Many of us are probably just dealing with it at this point. I know I am. I’ve got android phones so I’m not that familiar with Iphones, but there are probably some similarities when it comes to this. A few things I would check:
Is wi-fi on your wifes phone on continually or does she turn it on when she gets to work? If it’s not on all the time, that would help.
Androids have location tracking through google maps that can be turned on as well. See if that is on or off.
You can also turn on location history tracking if it’s available within the Iphone.
Most, including myself, also have Life360 app. This keeps track of your location a little better. If you’re a privacy nut though, none of these are for you as they scream your location all over the place. These things can also be battery killers.
I don’t think it’s a phone issue as much as a Smartthings issue. My wife’s phone tracks fine (I can see it from “Find My Friends” for example, and the GPS tracks all her walking). I think it’s something to do with the family account system ST uses. For example: my phone is set EXACTLY the same way as hers, but I have no problems (essentially we have the same phone, except she’s not the primary ST account person and I’m really positive this is the issue).
I’ll look into other Fobs or sensors I can use in the meantime, because it looks unlikely that ST is going to solve this problem anytime soon.
But just to ask – are you saying that Life 360 is something able to link into the ST app? Because, on its own, I really think her phone is tracking just fine. If Life360 can be linked though it might be worth exploring.
I hear ya! My wife and I have the same exact phones and set ups as well. (Samsung S5’s) Mine will track fine for a few days then fall off, then hers will work fine for few days then fall off. It’s a crap shoot. I do think it’s an ST issue, just don’t know if they even know how to solve it. I’ve been going back and forth with ST support for about a week and a half trying to figure it out.
I’ve seen where people do get the Fobs, but some have battery issues and others don’t really see any improvement. IMHO I don’t think it’s worth it to buy one more piece of equipment when the phone should work just fine.
Life 360 does not integrate directly to ST. It does however manage to update your location more often than the phone does itself. Not sure how that magic happens, but it has made an improvement on our presence sensing. It’s a free app so I figured it couldn’t hurt.
I don’t know if just talking to the phone helped or perhaps the one small change I made (for an iPhone you can choose whether it will use celluar data for background apps or not – this is actually a change in iOS due to some people running up huge data usages when they thought they were using wi-fi only. I changed it to use cellular for Smartthings only – all the rest were turned off) but now it’s worked for the last day or so (where it had only worked for one day previous).
Mine has worked just fine ever since I set it up (but that was only a week ago so…). I’m with you on the fobs, where the reviews say they are a PITA. Given that my wife’s phone is located just fine for all other things (for example, right now I can see where it is on the “Find my friends” app, which is similar to Life360) I’m positive this is an ST issue and I don’t think I’ll pursue it anymore.
(Life360 is supposed to be able to integrate directly into ST according to that article and the FAQ about doing it, I just can’t get the app to connect the two to work).
I resolved my iPhone presence issue by adding the offending iPhone a second time and then deleting the offending iPhone version. Of course, I had to go re-write everything to address the “new” phone, but presence is working again!
Same fix as KayakL8 for me with Android. In API device was showing as inactive. I added again in mobile app and new device shows active.
Tried copying the new device ID into the old device but it still shows as inactive.
One thing I noted is the new device ID is very different from the old one and seems to have three fields- an email address, a field same ength as old ID, but different and now with hyphens, and a new long field. Not sure what these are- don’t tie up with phone mac or hardware ID.
There must be an easier way to make a mobile presence sensor “active” again- it’s a pain haivng to go through and rebuild the Smartapps onto the new device.
We have an Android that works fine all the time and an iPhone 6s that never seems to leave the house but always returns at a new time. I finally got rid of the app sensors and started using Life360. It’s an app issue. iPhone works 100% now. No changes to anything on the phone other than switching from Smartthings App to Life360 App. It’s just better at determining where the phone really is. The kids have the fob presence sensors and those seem to work fine too.
I used to feel the same way, here lately seems the Life360 software on SmartApps is not getting the information from Life360. I have 3 users all on life360 app with Iphone. I am the only one running and maintaining Smart things app. It constantly could not tell one of the users was home or left. I deleted all users and smart app life360. Pain in the butt. Now its doing the same thing to my user on life360. Only way to resolve is to run through the setup process of the Smartapp and then it registers my location.
Native presence seems to be working fine on my phone with a large geofence (larger than I’d like but whatever), but my wife’s phone is slower and usually doesn’t report being home until a few minutes after she arrives, even though I tied her in with an even larger IFTTT geofence (probably a mile radius from the house). I’ve started experimenting with Tasker/Autolocation/Sharptools to see if I can get better accuracy. My goal is to get it down to trigger when entering our street, probably 200 yard radius. I got everything set up yesterday but we’re out of town til tomorrow so I haven’t been able to test yet.
Very cool! I am looking forward to hearing if the custom presence solution works out well for you. Tasker is both a blessing and a curse - there’s a lot of tweaking you can do to really get it to work the way you want, but sometimes you get sucked into the vacuum of endlessly tweaking things!
If AutoLocation alone doesn’t work, I’ve seen some people leverage low-resolution location providers like cell towers to detect when they get into a very broad zone which then triggers a high-resolution location provider like GPS (which also consumes more energy) to detect when they cross a more precise threshold. If I remember correctly, you can even do this with AutoLocation where you start with a low resolution geofence then trigger the monitoring of the higher resolution geofence.
This is exactly what I have set up. I defined two “perimeters” around the house, one about 3/4 mile radius and one about 200 yard radius around my house. When the standard geofencing service detects that I have entered the outer perimeter, it turns on AutoLocation high accuracy mode and pings GPS every 5 seconds until I either enter the inner perimeter (at which point it uses Sharptools to change a simulated presence sensor to “present”) or exit the outer perimeter, which puts the phone back into standard geolocation mode.
In theory, anyway - I have yet to test, and I’m sure it will require some tweaking. Hopefully this will really improve things though. I’ve read a lot of good things about the accuracy of AutoLocation if you set it up correctly, i.e. the inner and outer permimeters.
It sounds like you have things under control, but let me know if I can help with anything related to SharpTools! Feel free to tag me here (@joshua_lyon) or reach out using “Send Feedback” from within SharpTools.
Oh BTW (off topic), one of the other use cases for SharpTools that I’m planning is to add a layer of security around NFC tags. I started playing with these last week using the Maker channel on IFTTT but anyone can open the URLs and trigger the “that” in IFTTT that way. Alternatively, having the NFC tag trigger a Tasker task that uses SharpTools to do ST actions means that only specific phones can trigger thr NFC actions. So another thumbs up there
Would it be possible to post some pics of your profiles & tasks? I’d really like to get a grasp on using the 2-tier location methodology. Thank you!
(I’m using “Wi-Fi Near” for actual presence and it’s been mostly good, but not good enough For several months I’ve also used Autolocation in parallel, i.e. just sending notifications so I can compare it to Wi-Fi Near. I can’t say I’ve observed any qualitative difference.)
I have been out of town and unable to test the two-perimeter setup so far. Headed home this morning. Once I test and get something that works well I was planning to start a “how-to” thread since I haven’t seen one yet. Give me a day or two and I’ll try to put something together.
Great app! I’ll get in touch with you if I have any questions or problems. Thanks!