Hi all,
I have been using a Pixel 4 since it was launched late last year. I immediately added it to smartthings as a presence sensor and have been super pleased with it overall. Way better than my Pixel 3 as reporting location and setting off my arriving and departing automations. In fact, if you had asked me seven days ago I’d have told you what an awesome phone it has been.
Fast forward to this past Sunday evening and as I am sitting on the sofa watching a film my kitchen lights and front porch light randomly turn on. I thought it strange, but turned them off and went back to what I was doing. I also took that opportunity to close my garage door. Only a couple minutes after I sat back down all of a sudden I hear my garage door opening and my lights come back on. At this point I start digging in to smartthings and lo and behold my phone had bounced back and forth between away and present several times over the course of the evening.
I hadn’t noticed it until it got after a certain time due to the rules on my automation and me having the garage open already. I started looking at my map apps (google maps and waze) and both had me very far away from my house, but they were both not always showing me in the same place (if that makes sense).
I would stare at the map and without moving at all watch my little blue dot (supposedly meant to be me) move down my street, out of my neighborhood, and hang out about a half mile from my actual location. Then it would snap back to being at my house, but then slowly start that process over again. Sometimes the process of the dot moving would be like I was driving slowly, but other times it was a quick jerk over to the new location.
I got on with Google support and walked through a bunch of stuff that didn’t make a difference and ultimately they sent a new phone out which arrived yesterday. After the painstaking task of setting it up I added it to smartthings and sure enough it is doing the exact same thing.
I don’t know what to think. My original Pixel 4 had worked great for six months, it never opened my garage door in the middle of the night (like it has once since this issue started) until the weirdness I observed about 5-6 days ago. If were were a hardware issue then you would have thought a new phone would fix it, but the new one is behaving the exact same way.
It could be software, but Waze hasn’t updated since late March and even though Google Maps updated 1 April I didn’t start seeing oddness happening until ~5 April.
To add to this my fiance has an iPhone 11 and it is connected as a presence sensor and has zero issues.
IDK, I may reach back out to Google and see about getting another replacement on the off chance I got a dud, but was wondering if anyone out there with Android phones and Pixel phones specifically have seen any strangeness like this occurring all of a sudden?
I have uninstalled Waze, uninstalled updates for Google Maps, and ensured that my location accuracy is set to high, so I don’t know what could have gone so wrong in the past week to make this start happening. Hoping the community may have some ideas. Thanks