Mobile presence sensor stopped working

I’ve been having the same issues here. Both my wife and I have Android S8s. Sometimes it will detect I have left but takes forever to know I"m home. I have my alarm setup to disable when someone arrives. It is always going off when we get home.

Is there a fix for this yet? I have reassigned my geo fence without any luck. Removed and added mobile presence sensor. Still nothing. Very very frunstrating.

I have a new update from my end. Both my wife’s phone and my phone’s mobile presence started working as they used to before, and I’m not entirely sure if we got some update from Samsung or Google. As far as I can tell, there was no app update. We may have gotten some Android security updates, but nothing more.

So we noticed it started working when we switched our mobile carriers. My wife was on Verizon and I was on AT&T and we decided to consolidate into a family plan with T-Mobile. On the day of the switch, we noticed the mobile presence worked right away on both our phones. She has a Pixel 2 and I have an S8+ which adds even more variables to the mix. As far as I can tell, this carrier switch fixed it for us. I won’t say with certainty that it will for you, but so far, it’s been good for us. Not sure if anyone out there with this problem is a T-Mobile user.

Logically, I feel that geofencing should not have any dependency on phone carriers, but what do I know? In the meantime, I hope this permanently fixes it for us.

Strangely enough, I did the same thing in late November, switching from Telus to Koodo, however they are technically the same company.

I’ve noticed the improvement of the presence sensor too, but not 100%. I’d say 90% accurate this time, I still saw a long delayed presence update 2 weeks ago and that’s after my switch carrier. Not updated until I open the classic app to check.

It’s not related to any provider. Google changed Android a lot.
Based on personal experience, the only way to get consistent results an virtually no delays is to have phone connected to car and Android Auto running.

That did not work out for me either. I had seen couple of times when I used Android auto to do navigation for my commute and weekend routes, I still found my presence being home. There’s really no pattern to follow

I suspect it has something to do with this: https://dontkillmyapp.com/nokia

I’ve had some brief luck using ADB to remove those overly aggressive task killers on my girlfriend’s Nokia 6.1, but it seems to only work for a day or two and then the problem persists. Hopefully this is something Nokia takes note of, as of right now its rendering a lot of my Smartthings automations useless.

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Good call putting that together. I read about that issue but it didn’t click that it was probably the issue since its not my phone so I don’t get faced with the issue day to day. What is strange is I switched over to running IFTTT which is monitoring for a wifi connection which seems to work for the most part. I would have guessed that would get killed too, but maybe the act of connecting to wifi wakes it back up.

Interesting, is this the guide you used to set that up?

I haven’t read good things about the official Smartthings Arrival Sensors, so I’m hesitant to use those.

I didn’t use that guide, but that’s what I did. I’ll have to teach my daughter to kill that power saving app when she reboots. I even noticed that app running in the background. Shame on HMD. They are killing it with speedy updates and good low end phones, but app killers are a no no with today’s Android. Doh!

Read this whole thread and there’s lots of Google talk, but I’m having the same issue with iOS and the new app.

It worked perfectly until I switched to the new app a couple weeks ago.

Very sporadic and I can’t characterize the problem.

In my list of “members”, in addition to our two phones, there are two “Mobile presence” items listed. What are these? I thought there was 1 for each of us, but when my wife was removed from the list there were still 2.

I created 8 automations. 4 for these items leaving and 4 for these items arriving. I should get a notification for each. I’ve only ever received notifications for our phones, but it’s very irregular.

There are other disappointments with the new app, but this is by far the worst.

I went in SmartThings’ graph api and found that the two “Mobile presence” items were the same devices from the old app. I deleted them (one said I didn’t have permissions, but it worked anyway).

Let’s see what happens now.

What was I supposed to do when switching to the new app? Might have been wise to log out instead of just deleting it…

Lots of questions arise when you look in the graph api. All sorts of items you can’t see anymore in the new app. Seems like they are still working though.

True you’re supposed to keep using the classic app until they told you to migrate to the new one because not all smart apps and DTH are working in the new app.

As for the presence I don’t have much information since I’m still using classic and my wife’s iPhone is way better than mine in terms of accuracy.

This month again it’s off for my phone, never “arrive home” for several nights…

Yeah, removing those from the old app didn’t seem to help at all. Still just as sporadic, mostly not working.

I have noticed a couple times that when I launch the app the notification for my mode change pops.

So now I’m wondering if the SmartThings app has to be running for this to work at all. So if the crashes or is closed in the background (which happens all the time) maybe it won’t work at all.

I resorted to getting a Samsung button that I have to remember to press or double press when I’m coming or going. So far this has been even less reliable… :slight_smile:

So I think I may have figured out the issue for those that may be experiencing the same thing. I went into the Smartthings IDE and found that I had two HOME locations. One which had mostly all of my devices and one that had a couple devices. I found that one HOME was for my Smartthings Classic app (which I still use) and one was for the new Smartthings app (which I only use for my PowerBot). For some reason the phone presence was being added to the HOME for the new app. So I found that the HOME for the new app was set as my default location. So I changed my default location to the Classic app HOME and readded my phone as a presence sensor and it successfully added to the classic app devices. So far it has been working properly so fingers crossed!

Well you probably have not cause I don’t use the new app and have never configured so I only have one presence sensor and one location.

It’s been almost a year and no improvement at all, sad…

Doesn’t hurt to double check. Go here to see your locations and you can make sure you don’t have 2 listed.

Thanks, just went there and confirmed only 1 on my list :frowning:

So I got a new phone and this happened to me.

I believe the issue is dynamic IP address. If you use a reserved or static IP for the phone it seems to consistently update, even if not immediately.

With dynamic as soon as the IP changes you basically get no further updates.

Do you mean the network settings on the phone? How to do that?