iPhone 4s always says its present

i have two iPhone 6 plus devices set up as presence sensors in smartthings which work great but my son has an iPhone 4s which always says he is present no matter where he is. Any ideas on how to get his phone working as a presence sensor?

In my experience, when that happens there are a couple of things to do/check:

  • Make sure the ST app on the iphone is running (even if in the background).
  • In Settings, select the ST app (scroll down), and “re-set” its settings; whenever I restart the phone for whatever reason, I go there, change settings to say “Never” for location, off for background and off for use cellular data, and then I set them back to “Always”, on, on (which is what they should be). That seems to convince iOS to start again pushing the right location information to the ST app.

In any case, opening the ST app will trigger a presence refresh; so, you may well want to ask your son to do that when he’s out of the house, just to make sure things are set up right.

I had the same issue, one thing that helped was turning off and on the location feature of the iphone, Settings -> Privacy -> Location, make sure it’s on for ST App and then turn off the GLOBAL (main on top) button for location, wait for a few and turn it on. It started worked thereafter.

In addition to what @minollo said which is also required for me, ensure that background is enabled for the sT app