Noob question - mobile presence for second user not showing up (at all)

(MILOSZ I STASIK) #1

Hello,
I have searched topics on presence and most of them refer to the consistency of mobile presence not updating correctly (especially on iOS), I’m yet to face the issue because presence is not showing up for me at all.

Specifically, I have set up ST account and then invited my wife (she’s is still on iOS 10). She accepted, created and account and can happily turn our devices on and off. So far so good.

She can see my presence, I can see that she accepted and in manage users setting is listed as Active however her presence is not listed at all.

Thinking I did something wrong I removed her, restarted ST hub and invited her again. Same thing - she accepted, everything works, I see her active but her presence is not there.

I’m out of ideas and I can’t find a discussion topic that would be helpful. Any suggestion what to do next would be greatly appreciated.

(MS) #2

@mista I’m a noob too, so please don’t consider this to be the final word- but I’ve been told that the ST presence is a bit ‘less than stellar’. I signed up for Life360 (free account is good enough) and it’s been great in my whole, whopping, 4 days of testing. So far, so good. FYI- I came to ST from Wink, and the Wink users all seem to love Life360 as well. Hope it helps.

(MILOSZ I STASIK) #3

Thanks @merrick777, this may be a piece of the puzzle.

I would still like to find a way to see my wife’s presence under the Home>Family tab…

To provide a broader context, I want to be able to find a way to set up a geofencing conditional that can be summed up as:

If X is coming home AND it is after sunset AND and Y is not yet home either THEN turn on lights 1 and 2.

Even though this is a basic logical statement seems there’s depressingly large amount of hoops to jump through. Apparently IFTTT can connect Life360 to ST but it offers only trigger, stringify is another option I’m looking at but I would love to hear from the community what is the recommended approach

(MS) #4

No… You wouldn’t need IFTTT for this level stuff- there’s a SmartApp available and Life360 presence WILL be seen in Home -> Family (in fact, it’ll even show as the identical icon as ST native). Definitely look into Webcore… it’s “rules” on steroids - VERY powerful

(MS) #5

BTW, personally, I try to stay away from IFTTT whenever possible… it’s valuable, but adds more server jumps, which can delay actions.

#6

Did you also add her phone as a presence sensor (from the Market Place)? Just asking as you didn’t mention this in your original post.

(MILOSZ I STASIK) #7

@elf No - I did not, wasn’t aware of this step :frowning: . I’m looking for it now in the Marketplace, however I’m can’t find it - I looked in Presence & Modes but also other groups and it’s not there. Do you recall where it is?

#8

When in doubt, read the manual. :wink: Or in this case, the official knowledgebase.

You can enable this feature at any time by following these steps in the SmartThings app:

Note that you have to do it from her phone in order to have that particular phone recognized as a presence device.

(MILOSZ I STASIK) #9

Note to self: RTFM! Thanks @JDRoberts ! That took care of it.

Now I’m off to figuring our the multi trigger event.

(KL Forslund) #10

Let’s back up a step. I’m in the same boat as the OP. I think my wife pooched the initial setup. Per the URL you posted:

It has this first section:
How to add your phone or tablet as a mobile presence device during initial setup

Bold emphasis is mine. I think she said “no” to allowing access to the location. How do we turn that on?

I see no explanation on that, or if the next section “How to add a phone or tablet as a device” is the exact same thing done manually or a different module. If it’s different, I don’t want that, I just want to turn on the thing my wife messed up on.

I am not keen to install more crap without research when the mechanism we seek should be tied to a simple permission setting and changeable after the initial setup.

So, who knows the what’s what with the one-time opportunity to set this?