Location issues on Android Pixel phone

Devices & Integrations
1

This is mostly for Android folks.

Wondering if anyone else is having issues with location reporting?

Several times a day my Alexa geofence will trigger showing that I’ve left home and a minute or two later that I’ve returned. That flips SmartThings into Away and then Home mode. The app for my dog’s GPS collar sometimes also says she has left her safe zone.

If I catch things in time and open Google maps I usually see that the location accuracy is very low and sometimes it thinks I’ve jumped about a half mile away.

The house has a metal roof which blocks GPS but Google has always compensated by “knowing” where my Wi-Fi system is located. I used to see this once in a great while. A couple of weeks ago it started happening multiple times per day.

Pixel 10 pro phone running Android 16 with all the latest updates. Anyone seeing anything similar?

2

Are you using Wi-Fi 7 with Multi-Link Operation (MLO)? I am and have the same experience as you on my Samsung phone where Alexa thinks I’ve left the geo-fence and immediately thinks I’ve returned. Explanation from our friend chatgpt:

On a Galaxy S24 Ultra + Eero Pro 7 mesh, having all Intelligent Wi-Fi features enabled is almost a textbook setup for geofence bouncing — especially when the phone is stationary.

Here’s what’s happening in plain terms:

Your mesh is dynamically steering your phone between:

- Nodes
- 2.4 / 5 / 6 GHz bands

Samsung’s Intelligent Wi-Fi is:

- Monitoring signal quality
- Switching bands
- Power-saving Wi-Fi radio
- Evaluating network quality in the background

Each time that happens, Android’s fused location provider recalculates position using Wi-Fi fingerprint data.

Alexa sees tiny coordinate shifts and reacts immediately.

There are a number of suggestions for things to try including disabling MLO on your Wi-Fi, increasing the size of you geo-fence, and disabling the use of Wi-Fi for Location Services.

3

My Wi-Fi mesh is the original Eero pro from 2018 so don’t think I’m even up to Wi-Fi 6 much less 7.

Not sure if it dynamically changes nodes. I often see devices connected to a more distant node than they should be.

I’ll poke around on that possibility though.

4

Seems like this had settled down but of course it’s back.

Over the course of 8 minutes, all while I’m sitting in a chair in the living room I got 10 cycles of my Alexa “away” and “home” routines cycling.

I pulled up notification history and I see multiple repeats of silent notifications with SmartThings reporting “Updating location info…” followed by Alexa reporting" “GeoFenceTrigger”.