Just a quick update on my recent experience with upgrading to iOS 11… My wife received a new iPhone 7 running iOS 11 for Christmas to replace her old iPhone 5s running iOS 10. I was very pleasantly surprised to see her SmartThings mobile presence working properly. So, I took the plunge and upgraded my iPhone 7 to iOS 11 as well. It also appears to be working correctly (limited data set, though). It looks like some recent SmartThings App updates specifically mention improvements to mobile presence, so maybe they’ve finally got this issue sorted out? Only time will tell for sure.
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This is still not working as it should. My personal experience on my own phone is that my presence is detected pretty regularly, but my wife’s identical phone running an identical iOS and ST app version is as unreliable as mine is regular. Even if she opens the app after departing, the presence doesn’t update. I’ve deleted and reinstalled it, checked all the usual suspects like background app refresh and location services, etc. - nothing seems to help.
The more time I spend with SmartThings the more in love with the platform I fall, but this one issue is enough to tear the whole ecosystem to ruins. It breaks every paradigm that home automation espouses and just makes for a generally very crappy experience.
There have been several updates to the app claiming to be making continuous improvements in this area - we haven’t had a comment from a ST employee in quite some time here. Can someone please provide us a status update?
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They have had a Beta specific to IOS going since November. I don’t know how far into that they have gone or if any of it has been released into the current version or not. So they have actively been working to improve this. I’m on Android with no issues, so I couldn’t tell you where they are with this:
I hate to be that guy to bring threads back from the dead, but this is just getting ridiculous. The presence has improved exactly 0% since this was first reported, as far as I can tell - and it’s genuinely making the entire solution unviable.
I see in other threads (SmartThings app will receive a major overhaul in Q1 2018 for example) that there is a total overhaul to the mobile app coming. Does this, by any chance, include a rip and replace of the mobile presence detection? Or will we see a bunch of new chrome and no improvement to the things that are really having an impact? There are two possibilities in my experience - either there has been no progress on the problem in the current app because the related engineers are busy building something brand new to replace it, or it’s being ignored completely because other priorities have buried it.
Can someone, anyone from the ST team please respond here and provide some kind of a meaningful statement? It doesn’t take much to go a long way towards satisfying a request like this.
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I agree an update would be much appreciated. I haven’t seen an improvement in mobile device presence and unfortunately renders a lot of SmartThings inactive.
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Monday
5 Mar 2018
18:37 EST
jawn101, my experience is identical to yours. The presence of my iPhone 6s running iOS 11.2.5 works fine; my wife’s 6s with the same iOS is not detected at all, even if she opens the app while away – her phone is “sensed” as permanently present.
Therefore, (for example) lights don’t turn on for her when she arrives home.
We’ve had this problem with the SmartThings app for at least a year with no changes/improvements.
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Yeah. I noticed just today that there is a brand new ST App coming for iOS - I am hoping it will be a total windfall of fixes for this issue.
Loaded and configured new app. Mobile presence still not working on IOS IPhone X !. Come on Samsung really ???
Not that it matters, but it works perfect on mine.
Matters to me John !
Are you using an account on Smartthings, or your SAMSUNG account ?. Just tying to narrow this down. I used to use smartthings account, but it all stopped working correctly a few months ago. I loaded the new app this week, in great hope, but it literally does nothing when I leave the house…
Any info gratefully received…
Regards
Paul
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Sorry, some people get bent out of shape when you tell them that something works.
SmartThings account.
Presence has become extremely unreliable again for us. It has been working great for months but the last two weeks or so it has been awful again. So frustrating how this can’t stay stable.
Nest shows we are away… SmartThings doesn’t.
Hi everyone,
I just want to add that once again smartthings iphone presence is broken. After my recent update to IOS 15 smartthings has once again only been detecting presence when i open the smartthings app. At first, if the app was open in the background presence would work but the app had to be open in the background of foreground. If the app the was swiped away and not in the background, presence wouldn’t work at all.
This morning, even though smartthings was open running in the background, my presence was detected when I left home.
I have tried all of the “usual” things, background app refresh is on, location is always. I haven’t changed anything in the settings since IOS 15 update and smartthings presence stopped working.
Very frustrating to say the least.
Hi,
I have noticed sporadic behaviour since iOS 15. For the most part my presence has been working but there have been times that it has not. I was signed out of the app randomly and had to sign back in and since I’ve done so I haven’t experienced any issues….so far…. I will continue to monitor and reply again if I have any more issues.