I’ve been with Apple’s beta group for a few years now. I’ve download IOS 11 beta since it was out before the public. It’s never worked with my iPhone 7 Plus ever. Now I upgraded to iOS 11 gold on my mother’s phone, iPhone 6s Plus and it stopped working.
Please do open support tickets. Only then they will know it’s a widespread issue.
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I wholeheartedly agree this is important, but I’m one of the folks who (thanks to this thread!) is holding off on upgrading to iOS 11, so I don’t have any data to submit for research to ST via a support ticket.
Hopefully ST realizes that there are plenty of folks like me aren’t yet directly affected, but who are also anxious to see this issue resolved!
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Been with ST and love & support ST for nearly 2-3 yrs plus but this issue is the one that they could never resolve. Yes, there are several factors which may effect your geofence presence detection but how come all others except ST gets it right?
Another issue forever is that most of the times your ST mobile app never actually reflects the actual mode that you are in (although correct in IDE) unless you force kill your app. Reported this a zillion times, acknowledged by support, several app releases during this time but never fixed.
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I sent them an email with the issue.
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Can confirm ST presence doesnt work with iOS11 unless you open the app. I have a 7 Plus and the wife has a 6s. Both do not work correctly now that we are on iOS11
Yep, you are confirming what many others already have.
Please email support@smartthings.com. The more that contact ST the more hope we have they actually address this before working on other, less pressing needs (like the new dimmer bar, ahem). Seriously, can you believe they spent time on a new dimmer bar when they KNEW in the beta testing that presence was borked with iOS11. They released a new ST app on iOS11 release day with a known broken presence function? Mind. Blown.
Meanwhile …
I have been wondering this myself for years.
I use a few other apps that use geolocation (e.g. for podcast downloads or photo album syncing to my NAS when I arrive home) and they have never been as problematic as ST.
For the last several months at least, mobile presence has actually worked quite well for me and my wife.
There is no way I’m updating to iOS 11 til they get some kind of fix in place for this.
Presence has never been reliable for me with my iphone 6s plus. Same with the other iphone in our household. It would work some days and some days not. I am on ios 11 now, and presence is no different. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. iOS 11 had no change whatsoever for me. Presence stayed the same…inconsistent. Hopefully though, with more people posting about it, something will be discovered.
Life360 is not updating my location unless I have the app running either and yes background refresh is on as is use location always.
Think it’s something to do with Apple moving from swift 3 to swift 4. Unless the app is updated accordingly then there could be problems. Just what I’ve heard. 
Don’t quote me on that though!
Background refresh and location service should as such should always be on for ST.
Well, again my wife’s presence failed to report presence. Force killing the app refreshed the status. So, pretty much all the routines related to presence is worthless Turn off your sirens and all the stuff that you do to keep the WAF at the same level. Huh! @Brad_ST
Yes, in addition to “Always allow” for location services, please also check that background refresh is enabled for the SmartThings app:
I know it’s frustrating to hear but also try rebooting your device to see if that improves presence.
What @Brad_ST recommends are no doubt best practices and some people will have an improved presence experience by doing that.
But is that seriously the extent of the issue for many of the people reporting this?
This. It is a good reminder, and I did check, but considering the majority of this forum is power users, I’m sure that was checked off the list a long time ago.
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Just search on iOS mobile presence under my alias @smart. Last 3 yrs now. Also, check @JDRoberts threads as well. He is the guru of all things.
2014: Setting up multiple iPhones (separate linked accounts) as presence sensors for dummies
On top of that since the favorites on dashboard was introduced, even though you are present or away, the background refresh fails even if your app is running in the background. When you bring the app to the foreground, it will take a few seconds to refresh to the correct presence status.
And on top of that do you really expect your missus to do all this crap? 
Force kill and relaunch the app? She will much rather kill us.