Location based automation issues

It all started by me discovering that Life360 based location support has (quietly?) been discontinued (third time ST forced me to change this setup, but that’s another story). So I set up a new location based automation that would arm and disarm the system based on presence of two phones in the house.

The first attempt didn’t work, so I recreated both the arm and disarm automations including notifications to tell me when they fire. Now they seem to work.

Except: The iOS app seems to change its mind about how the automation is set up every time I look at it. On the main screen for the automation no person shows under IF (Randomly the display under IF and above the location changes to nothing, my phone or both phones; this is the only inconsistent piece of the behaviour). When I tap the condition, I see only myself and not the other phone under “Who”. I then tap on who but both phones are checked. I tap back and both phones show up all of a sudden. I have made NO CHANGE. The rest of the behaviour can be reproduced every single time I go through these steps.

This is all on an iPhone mini iOS V 14.2.1 and the Samsung SmartThings app v 1.6.57-463.

I have deleted both automations and re-created them several times now, deleted and re-setup phones as presence devices, even uninstalled the app and re-installed it. The same behaviour can be seen on the other phone (also an iPhone mini). On a reference phone (Samsung S8) the automation always shows up correct!

I have been trying to get support to acknowledge there’s something wrong and investigate this as a ST bug (including sending them screenshots and several videos of the behaviour) but all they keep telling me is to re-create, re-download etc without anyone acknowledging this as a ST issue, it’s always user error (which at this point I think I have sufficient evidence that it’s not). They either don’t seem to understand or don’t want to, and keep going back to the same useless SOPs.

Is this a known thing? Anyone else seen this? How can this be escalated to someone who can actually do something about this? It’s incredibly annoying if automations can’t be trusted even if they supposedly work but the app doesn’t agree with how it operates. Thanks!

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Mind sharing these images/screen recordings here? Otherwise, PM me your ticket number and I can take a look.

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The video is available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1acCQ2W8ekAG99wGxgIY89nXRLZYgymOZ/view?usp=sharing

(Let me know if you prefer I add it as an attachment but I don’t think this allows for videos).

Note that it keeps going back to “everyone” under the WHEN condition as soon as it changes its mind that there’s two people in the automation (when in fact it’s been setup and acts like the “anyone” condition).

If that doesn’t help illustrate the issue, I’d be happy to PM you the ticket number as well. Thanks!

@darth.loki It’s not just you. This issue started happening with my iPhone and my wife’s iPhone around Jan 3rd/4th. I’ve tried everything I can to fix it, but the experience you’re having is exactly what’s happening to us as well.

@garrett.kranz Let me know if I can help in any way.

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Hi @ManHands, sorry for the delayed response.

What @darth.loki was dealing with seems to be a display issue of the Automation itself within the iOS App. His Automation works and was saved correctly to the Cloud, it’s just for some reason the iOS App is struggling to display it properly. I’ve reproduced this on my own Location and reported this to our Engineering Team for further review and resolution.

If you’re having actual issues, I might recommend making a new thread for this or contacting support.