Forcing mobile presence to update

Our presence sensors are extremely reliable at determining whether we are home/away but (as is well documented) our mobile presence is all over the place. My daughter’s older iPhone (running an older version of iOS) updates correctly and timely about 80% of the time. My i5 is pretty accurate (I’m always on ST!) but my wife’s is never accurate. She has to physically open ST when home or away to update the correct current location of her device.

No surprises I’m sure.

So I thought I could use the presence sensors to ping our iPhones for location updates every time their values changed from home to away and vice verse. The code is straight forward and appears to function correctly as I have it sendPush to confirm that it’s been run. Unfortunately, it still fails to update the location on my wife’s phone despite acknowledging the fact that her car has left.

Is there any other method that will invoke what I’m looking for? Any ideas or methods that have been found to increase reliability of mobile presence? I know the issue is widespread and commonly reported - just trying to increase accuracy. It’s hard to arm security functioning of ST when it doesn’t know whether or not your home.

I am having this issue too. One thing I did notice is that with the new IOS update the issues keep occurring.

I have been having a lot of issues with the mobile presence. It either works or I have to open the ST app for it to work.

I have been emailing support about this for a while now - they told me that they are testing an update internally that “looks promising” and hope to have it out “soon” - in other forums I have heard they are working on a pretty major update to the ios app that they hope to have out in time for the holidays, I don’t know if that is related or not - and this wasn’t anything official, so take with a grain of salt.

FWIW, it seems to be related to the quality of the connection to the internet from the phone. My wife (why is it always our wives’ phones??) works in a hospital where she frequently has no cell or wifi. When she spends time in and out of those areas, her ST app will stop “checking in” until she opens the app again.

I really hope this does get an update. I would love to use it for locking and unlocking my doors, but it is way to un-reliable to do something like that.

@stevesell

Thanks Steve.

Likewise Jeff, I can’t install any real security functionality until the presence issue is resolved. Won’t waste my time. For now the coding is keeping me busy (and happy).

I’m gonna play around with Arduino and LEDs while I wait on that update!

So did the big iOS app update fix anyone’s iPhone presence sensor issues? My wife and I each use our iPhones as presence sensors too and sometimes they are incredibly reliable and sometimes not so much.

@link266 - My wife and I also use our iPhones (one 5 and one 5s) as presence sensors. I was all excited because both thur, fri last week my wife’s phone didn’t lose sync (usually it’s hers I think because she works in a low cell coverage area and the the app “gets stuck” at some point). Two days in a row was unheard of under 1.4.x, so I thought maybe it was fixed…

But alas, Sunday both of our phones got “stuck” in opposite modes - mine was stuck at “Present” and hers was stuck “not present” even though we both left our house three times together and arrived together. I could tell because our arrival and away actions stopped happening, which caused me to open my phone to look - and my phone updated and I saw my wife’s was in the opposite mode even though she was standing next to me.

I think ST is aware that it’s still an issue, but I’m starting to think that it might not ever be “reliable” - sad, really because this was the main thing that sold me on ST.

@Stevesell, thanks for your response! Bummer to hear that the reliability hasn’t improved enough yet to be dependable. I’ve considering trying the physical ST presence sensors but seems like people are having major issues with their battery life. :confused: