Phone as presence sensor not triggering automations in new app

Yes. Multiple.

The last update:

We have reviewed your account and see that the both mobile presence devices are updating, so any issue with mobile presence accuracy will be caused by outside factors in the phone itself.

I replied back to that to reinforce that mobile presence did work perfectly when the phones were set up through the Classic app, and that the problems all started when I migrated to the new app (which required me to set up the phones from scratch, and then delete the old ‘devices’ that I’d used in Classic). It used to work. It doesn’t now. Nothing else has changed.

i am having the same problem - it only started with the last app update.

I am beyond frustrated at mobile phone presence not working.

It’s gone from being 100% reliable to being (to put it as nicely as I can) buggy and inconsistent.

What makes it even more frustrating … now that mobile phones no longer appear in the app as “Things” (like they did in the Classic app) there’s absolutely no way to know if presence is actually working — without logging in to the IDE, which is also going away. Mobile phone presence is now essentially invisible. Which is ridiculous.

I checked the IDE this morning. Of our family’s four iPhones, only two currently show a correct presence status. What’s the point.

(And yet magically, Uber and my local taxi company can find me within 30 feet of my exact location — consistently. Some of the fast food and restaurant apps that I use can tell exactly when arrive at their location, without fail. But SmartThings? Nope.)

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Mine seems to be working as expected now. About 2 weeks ago, I set up a WebCoRE piston to text me when I get home (as a test). It consistently triggers as I pull into our cul-de-sac.

I thought that presence-based automations were failing, but I found that I needed to log back into my Bond linked service. I checked my history, and

Mind you, I joined this party late, so I never used Classic (and thus never integrated Life360). I tested WebCoRE presence detection, but was getting delays from minutes to days. Not certain how to explain what might be different, nor am I smart enough to troubleshoot this. Happy to try to answer any questions if someone wants to know details about my setup.

This worked. Thank you very much. Wish I read this sooner.

Broken for me too.

IDE will always show the presence correctly, but the automations will NOT fire.

Same issues here since switching over to the new app. I used the Life360 integration as I found mobile presence through ST to perform pretty poorly even in the Classic app. This morning, in response to my ticket, the tech informed me that the ability to trigger automations through the Life360 presence integration is going away and incompatible with the new app.

I have found that L360 isn’t completely compatible within the new app. It isn’t L360, it’s the app. I’ve arrived home and had ST indicate that L360 is showing away, when in fact L360 indicates I’m home.

So I’ve done what I’ve done with so many other things, keep the automation out of ST as much as possible. I use IFTTT w/L360 to throw virtual switches to turn STHM on and off.

Sorry if this has been covered but when the new app was first developed, the arm and disarm didn’t work and there were rumours ST were not going to put it in the new app for liabilty reason.
Has this been resolved now then? So my presence sensor will arm my home monitoring when i leave?

Yes, this was resolved. You can use automations to set STHM status and location mode. You do not need virtual devices as mentioned above unless you are trying to manage STHM through webcore or ActionTiles. You can use virtual devices if you want to view to status of presence sensor in the device list, like it was in the Classic app. The new app does not show presence sensors in the device list. :frowning:

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Brilliant, thankyou for the reply. I did the migration link but realised than none of the automation transferred correctly.

So i deleted all the automation, started again, and that then allowed me to select the presence sensor and set the armed and away and disarm and home automations. So i’m a happy bunny.

I attached my presence sensors to a room, and in the list it show if the sensor is present or left?!
or do u mean something different?

Presence sensors in the new app do not show in your list of devices with present/not present displayed. If you haven’t removed the presence sensors from the Classic app, those will appear but they will cease when the Classic app is retired in 6 days.

If you haven’t enabled presence in the new app yet, go to menu > settings (the cog) and enable use location for this phone.

One way to determine if you are seeing your Classic or new app presence sensor:

Classic app presence sensor was labeled as first name + phone

New app presence sensor is labeled as full name + phone.

I recommend removing the Classic app presence sensor and focus on the new one.

Thanks for the correction. Didn’t even realize that you could do that.

Mobile presence has been rolled up in the concept of ‘Member Location’ in the app. For some reason that I don’t think anybody has had a bash at guessing at, it seeming so odd, not only have the actual mobile presence devices been hidden from view, but you can’t see the current Presence and Occupancy states anywhere at all. The same applies to the Linked Places that have been added to mobile presence on some devices.

However other devices using the Presence capability, such as the Arrival/Presence Sensor fobs, do still appear as devices.

Using phones as presence sensors worked pretty seamlessly for me prior to migration. However since migrating, the lag time has made it unusable.

I will arrive home, open the door and set off the alarm because the presence status has not yet updated to indicate that I have arrived home.

I’m also having issues where the “I’m Home!” routine runs before we leave in the morning, as if our phones just arrived when in reality we’ve been home since last night. Both Apple and Android phones are set to allow SmartThings to access Location all the time.

Looking for a way to get everything working the way it was again.

Exact same issues here.

It worked great before. Now, a greater time lag. And often inconsistent — with presence-based routines not always firing when they should.

Yes many thread about this deem it unusable.
Switch to Life360 and all will be well again.

I’m using cell phones as presence sensors. The Classic ST app had phones as things that displayed when they were present or not. Since the new app does not display the actual cell phones, I was advised to create simulated presence sensors in the IDE which I did. I have a webCoRE piston which sets the simulated phone sensors state to arrived or departed based on the real cell phones. In my experience (as others have also mentioned) the reliability seems to be questionable. But it’s the only thing I have at the moment.

However, now to my question. I was looking at the app history for one of the simulated phone sensors today and it correctly shows the phone left home at 9:16 am and arrived back at 1:00 pm. The event log in the IDE for that sensor matches to the minute. The log for the webCoRE piston matches to the second with the IDE. BUT, the IDE event log for the actual phone is missing the departure time altogether, and it shows the phone arrived back home 2 minutes and 32 seconds AFTER the webCoRE trigger fired. In fact, the actual phone’s log shows a departure time from yesterday, no arrival time back yesterday, and no departure time from this morning. So it is missing 2 time stamps, and a third one is late. How is this possible? Is this just a bug in the ST IDE logging? Something caused the webCoRE trigger to fire correctly. I just don’t get it.

I am having a similar problem. I also use my iphone as a presence sensor but through the life360 app. In the past couple of days I’ve noticed that my Webcore automations that rely on my life360 presence are not working.

What does the history show about the occupancy attribute? That seems to relate to Wi-Fi connectivity but ST have never commented on exactly what it does.

Because it makes no sense to show occupied when you are not present, the device integration will always set present immediately before occupied if it isn’t already. I don’t normally see that happen as my phone normally detects me nearby a couple of minutes before I am in Wi-Fi range.

I do often see the reverse happen. On departure I see unoccupied set immediately before not present`.

I use an Android phone and all that behaviour is visible in the logs. I am just wondering if, for whatever reason, you only see half the story in your logs.