Not certain this is the right place, but it does involve an automation.
I want to set up ST to help me track and get notifications of my daughter. I have it working for my android and I can get notifications when I enter/leave an area.
In this case, I have invited my daughter (iphone) and she has accepted. When I go to ST>FIND, I can see my phone. If I select Member Devices . . . nothing. It appears greyed out. I know? my daughter’s phone was accepted - if I try to add it again, I’m told she’s already a member.
How do I get her locatoin on my phone?
Currently SmartThings Find is only available on Samsung phones.
The phone location element was built on Samsung Find My Mobile, Samsung’s phone tracking service. This has a ‘guardian mode’ to let you grant access to arbitrary other Samsung users. However SmartThings Find used the SmartThings Location member model. So it was all a bit of a mess.
I note that guardian mode is being withdrawn at the end of the month so maybe SmartThings Find is going to be the preferred solution going ahead.
As far as I am aware, the SmartThings app doesn’t do phone tracking per se, it uses the host location services for geofencing. Hence why Find was using Find My Mobile.
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If I understand you correctly, ST location won’t work on iphone. Is that correct?
FWIW, don’t care much about tracking. Just want to know when my daughter leaves music class (example).
I’ll also note my phone shows on her ST app and hers shows on my ST app. However, both are grayed out
My understanding is …
The SmartThings app uses the host operating system’s location services to detect when the host device crosses in and out of a circular geofence defined for each SmartThings Location. This is used to set a ‘mobile presence’ device in each SmartThings Location to present or not present. The app currently hides that device from users and presents it as a Member Location in Routines. That will work on both iOS and Android.
To the best of my knowledge that is all you get if you don’t have a Samsung phone.
If you do have a Samsung phone, you get three additional ‘Linked Places’ per Location and the SmartThings Find service enabled in the app. SmartThings Find can locate certain Samsung devices and share their geolocation between members of the SmartThings Location. It may be aware other users have phones but it can’t use them.
You could perhaps invest in a SmartTag. Those rely on there being Samsung Galaxy devices nearby to detect and report on the tag locations. So you don’t really know how it will pan out for you.
Generally though, you probably have to get inventive for SmartThings to help you in this case but I am not convinced that is the way to go. I don’t really recommend having SmartThings on phones unless they have loads of free memory so it can’t get in the way and an owner who won’t mess with the setup.
I recommend life360.
Thanks. I’ll check it out.
I’ve looked at Life360 and others. The little I use location notification, the subscription is quite expensive.and the free version only allows two locations. I am using Life360 for tracking tracking.
What I want is an app that will notify me when a ‘member’ enters/leaves a location. No tracking. Just a notification when a member gets home (example). It seems ST does that, but, apparently, not on an iphone.