We have a routine that opens the garage when the wife comes home. about a week ago it stopped working. usually it tracks when the phone leaves home and sets the mode to away and then on return it opens the garage and sets the mode back to home. it stopped working so i disabled the rule and re enabled it, changed some of the delays to resave it. none of that worked. so i cleared the smartthings cache, didn’t help. uninstalled smartthings and reinstalled it didn’t help. location permissions are enabled for all the time tracking of both smartthings app and google maps. i even wiped the cache partition on the galaxy device and still no change . smartthings just isn’t registering if the phone leaves the home or comes home.on samsung find within the smartthings app it shows the phones location ( often need to refresh to update but its location is correct) also tried moving the home location on the map and changing the radius . still nothing . any ideas ? Also i noticed a notification from smartthings saying “updating location info…” which i hadn’t seen before and this notification just stays there unless you clear it . the notification also has a Stop button on it which i would assume stops it updating location info? cant find any information on this notification ..
Does this routine work when she runs it manually from her phone?
I’m asking because I had the same “issue” until I realized that I forgot to give access to a recently added device to my wife’s account.
Hi, thanks for responding, yes it works fine if manually run and it has worked for years up until last week.
You seem to have done the obvious and also the less obvious things.
Do you know if the mobile presence is failing to update on departure, on arrival, or both?
The mobile presence update does depend on there being reliable location detection to know if the geofence has been entered or exited, and also there being a data connection to report it. Has anything changed with where the phone is when arriving or departing that might affect it? Different bag, different place in a car, different public transport, faster or slower departures or arrival, changes in Wi-Fi coverage etc.
I see that now and again. SmartThings appears to depend on a geofence provided by the host device’s location services to detect arrival and departure. I have been hoping this might be an attempt to add its own sanity check from time to time.
Try disabling/enabling menu,settings, ‘get your location from this phone’, on the phone not working. You will have to add/confirm her account back to any routines using her location.
Thanks i tried that a while back but didnt make any difference. i will try it again today. going crazy trying to figure this out.
In terms of the presence its not detecting it leaving the geofence area or arriving. i tried to change the location of the home temporarily , change the radius etc but same problem. In terms of data on her device its fine and i’m able to track her device with smartthings find (though it seems to not have updated her location until i click refresh) on my device so it knows where she is but for some reason it’s not relaying to smartthings. we have had the occasional day in the past where it didnt run the routine but now its really not working at all.
In phone settings, apps, smartthings, app permissions do you have location, allowed all the time? App notifications, allow notifications? Usage, mobile data , allow background data usage? Usage, battery, unrestricted?
yes all those things are enabled and have tried toggling on and off but no luck .
If it stopped working recently you can download the previous version here.
i tried the old version of the app. It also didn’t fix the problem. funny thing was when in installed the app and went to check the routines it said " To edit this routine, smartthings needs to be updated. " so i made new versions of the routine in the old app just to test and still no luck.so we are still stuck with no location routines working.
Is anyone else having issues with location based routines or are we the only ones ?
For the moment i have dug up our old samsung zigbee presence sensors and put one of them in the car. it works but its slow as you have to sit in front of the gate for a bit before it registers that it back on the zigbee network but at least it works.
I gave up on ST presence several years ago when I tried to get it to work after Life360 support ended. Settled on using the Alexa app for geolocation with virtual presence sensors in ST. Alexa sets the state of the virtual sensors which are used in ST Routines in lieu of Member Location. This also abstracts the presence sensors from the geolocation tracking method.
Alexa geolocation isn’t supported in Europe.
Is your home location correct, set automatically or manually? And are you using a 150m radius (the lowest)? Just to clarify the geofence only works when you pass out of it or enter, nothing will happen when you are home. And your wife has her own samsung account in smartthings and on her phone?
Also another think to try/check is when you disable ‘get your location from this phone’ and before you turn it on again go into the Advanced Web App and make sure your wife’s device has been removed and if not delete it, then re-enable it and check her phone re-appears there. (You would have to add her back to any routines).
yes the geolocation is set manually and i have tried different sizes of the radius, my wife is driving more than 30 mins from home so she is definitely outside this when gone. i will try the web app thing today. Another thing i noticed in the last few days is that a few routines have disappeared. i dont know if its because we have tried downgrading the apps or what. its been a weird week or two with smartthings around here.
yah we dont use alexa here at all, we have google home but not even sure google is still working on that one. location has worked great in smartthings for us since 2016
it’s still not working i have tried every possible thing i can think of. This is really annoying.
- Update to the latest version of the SmartThings app.
- As I said before: check twice that your wife has access to all devices.
- Temporarily give your wife full access to your location.
- Answer all questions from @Andrew_Bartlett .