Phone presence wrong

General Discussion
1

Hi, I have setup my smartthings to turn off heating, lights and set to away more based on Phone presence. My wife left home more than an hour ago, I see her current location correctly in Life360, but the smartthings still reports her as present at home and the goodbye routine hasn’t run. Can you please help me understand why this can happen? Is there a better way of running the goodbye routine.

2

The simple answer is that mobile presence is flaky. I can have it ‘behave’ for a couple of weeks then I see it shows someone away when they are at home or vice versa. Our house is all Apple with a mix of iPhone 5, 6, 6s and 7. There does not seem to be a correlation between phone model and reliability and all have the latest version of the app.

3

Thanks very much for the information. What would be a better way of setting the away more? using physical presence sensors? or using other apps like Life360?

4

Excuse the silly question, but could you not just use the mobile presence feature of the official SmartThings app on which ever phone you have? Might be more reliable than life360 app?

5

I am using the mobile presence on the Smartthings app. I just happen to have Life 360 also on our phones. The problem is that the Smartthings presence isn’t working, but Life360 works fine.

6
3 Likes
7

Very useful information. I will check with my wife what she has been doing with her wifi. My phone presence seems to be working fine till now.

1 Like
8

You need to look into using this app.

You connect your phone presence and life360 presence to it. The app watches both items and sets a virtual presence to home or away based on if one of the 2 left or 1 of the 2 arrived.

See if that helps.

1 Like
9

Are you on andriod?
I had issues on andriod and disabled battery optimisation.
I still get an occasional issue but not very often.

1 Like
10

I use the ST & Life 360 approach. It works well for us. For us, Life 360 can sometimes be a little slower to update than ST but it is more reliable. By using the method described by @TN_Oldman you shouldn’t have any issues.

My wife is Apple and I’m Android. By using both, we haven’t had any presence issues in a very long time, even when ST occasionally forgets where your at.

11

Also if your both on Android?

You could use Tasker, and trigger trasker when your phone connects / disconnect to WiFi as a trigger.

Tasker tells sharptools, sharptools tells smartthings.

I have been doing this on my phone to trigger other options in Tasker. I had planned on using it as a trigger for reliable presence app. Just stuck with FOB and smarthings.

If your on IPhone you can’t use WiFi since I phones drop WiFi when phone sleeps or goes idle. You can tell android to maintain WiFi so it’s a fairly reliable detection if your phone is at the house.

Be aware the whole connect to WiFi thing will lag using FOB or other presence since it has to connect and then tell everyone.

Just more info for you to absorb.

1 Like
12

Hi Don, This smartapp seems to be taken down now from github. Would have resolved my problem. We use android phones. My wife mentioned that she usually turns off wifi and data when not required. I asked her to keep them on always to see if this resolves the problem for now.

Worst case I am thinking of having ifttt triggers with life360 and seperate triggers from smartthings presence… one of them should work.

13

I ended up writing my first two pistons for in CoRE. Hoping this will solve the issue.

Goodbye Piston:

If [any of wife life360 presence, wife smartthings presence] changes to "not present"
and
If [any of my life360 presence, my smartthings presence] changes to “not present”

(or)

If [any of wife life360 presence, wife smartthings presence] changes to "not present"
and
If [any of my life360 presence, my smartthings presence] is “not present”

(or)

If [any of wife life360 presence, wife smartthings presence] is "not present"
and
If [any of my life360 presence, my smartthings presence] changes to “not present”

Then

Run Routine “Goodbye!”

I’m Back Piston:

If [any of wife life360 presence, wife smartthings presence] changes to "present"
or
If [any of my life360 presence, my smartthings presence] changes to "present"
then
Run Routine “I’m Back!”

14

I went to just his github.com and drilled down from there. I’m mobile so didn’t download code. It looked like it was still there.

If not I think I have a copy on my PC

15

Seriously, that’s clearly your root cause why it was broken. No way for it to work if your phone has no data telling smartthings you’ve arrived.

1 Like
16

OK, don’t hate me here. By using any of “any of wife life360 presence, wife smartthings presence” or your life360/ ST presence, you are going to discover the state of the two presences may not occur at the same time so let’s say your wife’s life360 presence shows a change of “presence” and runs the “I’m Back” routine. It is possible the ST presence may not register as “present” for 1, 5, 10 or 20 minutes later in which case the “I’m Back” routine will run a second time. So not knowing what your “I’m Back” routine is, you could possibly be opening up your garage door twice (assuming she closed it after arriving).

2 Likes
17

How can you survive living in the same house ?

3 Likes
18

Sorry I haven’t included some of the conditions in the earlier post. I had the goodbye run only if the modes at that time are home or night and I’m back will only run if the mode is away.

If for example I’m back routine runs, the mode will change to home. So when smartthings presence catches up later, it wont run again.

19

Hahahaha, I’m the lone android among I phone’s.

1 Like
20

Feel The Force Luke.

1 Like