Mobile Presence with no other app functionality

Apps & Clients
1

I think it would be great to have a mobile presence application that only provides the mobile presence functionality. This would be great to have to allow home owners or business owners to know when someone is there without that person having the ability to control any of the things connected to your home. :smile: Sort of like a non-admin type of deal if you know what I mean. Thanks!

4 Likes
2

As an example, I would love to install on my middle-schooler’s phone, since she always has this on her, and SmartThings can do actions based on her presence. But I don’t want her directly messing with anything else on the network.

3

I think that’s one of the biggest gripes of using the mobile app, where it gives you control over everything plus notifications about everything that’s happening.

One alternative would be to use the native ifttt client on the smartphone and use the SmartThings integration. That way you could write a recipe that would perform certain actions based on geofencing. I haven’t tried this personally, but it seems feasible that you could do this without the need to install the SmartThings client on the phone and without having to invite them.

4

I believe you can do this currently with life360: Life360 Presence Sensor? or more?.

5

I wasn’t aware of Life360
 It looks like it may be exactly what I had in mind.

6

I was thinking more of a SmartThings app that would perform this function. This way the app can allow a device it is installed on to be added to the Things in the current ST app by an “admin” user. With this, for example, a parent with full control of SmartThings can install the app to a child’s phone. Then it can be added to SmartThings by maybe entering an email address associated to a user and the password. The app can then only be removed only after entering the email and password of the “admin” user to allow the app to be removed. This way, folks wont have to buy additional presence tags and they could use the presence tags they already own for other things (cars, pets, etc
). I think this would add to the already high value of SmartThings.

7

@doowsemaj that sounds a lot like life360. It is a free app on android or iphone. You would just have the owner of the child’s phone download the life360 app and sign up to be a part of your circle. You would grant them access by adding them through the life360 smartapp within smartthings. So they would not be able to control your smartthings, but you could setup certain things to happen based on their presence.