I’m in the same boat. Presence using our iPhone XRs (2) is very hit and miss, mostly miss. What does work flawlessly is Life360. I’ve yet to have a missed transition in the past week since switching all my automations to use it instead of the iPhone presence natively. The downside it is integrated as a switch instead of a presence, so the delays related to presence aren’t available. It is simply on or off in automations.
The work around to see the status of the native presence is to create a virtual switch for each member and toggle it in an automation for arrival and departure. That was how I was debugging my presence automations. A PITA but it finally made me realize native presence is broken and led me to go back to Life360.
I bet the only reason you are seeing some success is because you still have the classic app and your presence devices in there.
New app just plain doesn’t work with presence automations. It will fire them once, but never again. Even a simple turn light on when I get home, will work once after it is created but won’t work ever again. You have to delete the automation, add it back, and it will work, ONCE.
This pretty much sucks. What is really frustrating is not seeing anything from ST staff on this here. Does that not happen anymore? It’s been a while since I had any issues (Classic app worked) but in the past when I did, ST staff would be on here helping and even looking into the issue on my account. Guess they don’t help in that way anymore?
I was very reluctant to use the new app. I originally migrated last year, I noticed right away things were not working correctly. I remember them sending me notifications to manually to arm my Home Monitor when I would leave home. I went back to the classic version. This time, everything worked for about the first couple weeks. Then all of a sudden stopped working. I think they know the presence monitor isn’t working. I wonder if they work with the Samsung phones.
It’s irritating because presence is huge for us. Not coming home in the dark, arming and disarming the system, turning everything off, having lights turn on/off randomly during certain times when nobody is home… presence is probably the worst thing that could be broken for us, besides the entire system being down.
I never had to open the app, now since SmartThings is no long smart, we have to use the app constantly.
If I try doing a virtual switch for our phones, do I set them op as a virtual switch or a simulated switch?
Haven’t setup a “switch” before in ide, so not sure which one to use.
How would I tie my phones presence to the virtual switch? Seems a bit cumbersome. I can’t create an automation that says turn on the virtual switch when my phone arrives, because that is still using my phone to trigger the automation. I am obviously missing something with understanding how to use a virtual switch as a presence sensor. Again, it’s completely unnecessary though and wasn’t needed in the classic app.
After fighting with non working Presence Automations issues for weeks, I finally had a couple of very simple “Away” and “Return” Automations working or so I thought. it seems that the Presence sensor in the “If” statement “Away” automation randomly disappears and must be re- added. Not sure of the reason, but obviously this prevents it from working next time. So Smartthings “Smart House” has given me an new routine before leaving home. Do I have my keys, my wallet, and check my Smartthings Automations for any surprises. How crazy is that?
I got webCoRE installed and now I it looks like I have my presence sensor (phone) linked up to a switch I created. Still note sure the difference between virtual and simulated switch.
Seems like a lot of work just to try and get a basic feature to work as designed.
Presence needs to be fixed. I don’t want to have to rely on webcore or third part apps.
If you get it working with switches and/or webcore, do you mind posting back here what you did? I tried using webcore, and it still relies on the presence changing to “present”, which didn’t get triggered, so that didn’t work for me either.
Hello @Zymeth My presence triggering from present to away hasn’t been an issue for me. My IDE shows our devices updating correctly, it’s just that any automations will not work more then one time if you are using a presence device as the trigger. So if I mirror my phones presence to a virtual switch, and then use the switch to trigger the automation, it does work, for me. This is NOT ideal though, and is not the answer, only a bandaid
Ah, I might try that. I don’t understand what you’re saying, but maybe I can figure it out. For me, leaving home does trigger the Away automation, but it almost never triggers when I return home (though my iphone will show as present in the IDE). So hopefully I can it to work with your technique.
And I agree, this should just be basic, working functionality in SmartThings. It was the primary reason I bought this system.
Look at rontally’s post, a few above. It was suggested there to try webcore and mirror the phones presence to the switch. Took some playing around before I got it working. Still doesn’t look the way I want, my virtual switch is just an on/off switch and I wish it looked like the one he put in the post, with presence showing.
I’ve already tried webcore and it simply doesn’t trigger for me when I return home. I’m using my phone’s presence, though, so maybe I need to use a virtual switch instead? Wouldn’t that virtual switch still be changed based on my phone’s presence, though?
I can’t be certain. It shows as Present when I’m home. And my phone usually triggers the Away routine when I leave. But I’m the only here, so I technically don’t know what the IDE shows when I’m gone.
I tried that, and my virtual icon updated in SmartThings classic (downloaded it for testing), but it didn’t sync with webcore anymore. So I tried adding a new piston, but there wasn’t a way to have the then statement show presence away or present. If that makes sense at all.
Couldn’t get the settings on the piston to show the virtual presence to be present and away.
