Not sure what is going on but the last few weeks the Presence on my Wife’s Samsung 7 phone has been hit and miss. I even completely removed her account last weekend, reinstalled the software on the device and its been fine for 5 days and now it says she left at 7am this morning and not returned home. WTH is going with this stuff. My phone works perfectly fine
You need to turn off the app optimisation for the ST app or it will stop working every 3 days
Hi Steve_t, the only thing I see is under battery, the app optimization and this is turned off. I made sure of that on the re-install last weekend.
What is interesting is that just a few minutes ago it figured out the device is now home. But actually its been here since 5pm
Is her location services set to high accuracy? And under improve accuracy the option for Wi-Fi scanning is enabled? If so, the location should update when the phone connects to the home Wi-Fi network
Yes on both of those.
Look for any app power saving or battery options.
My Huawei Android aggressively kills apps consuming a large amount of power in the background. I needed to whitelist the Smartthings app to get presence working reliably.
One thing before reading further. Make sure that the App Permissions (Location, Contacts and Storage for SmartThings are all Enabled on her phone and compare them to the app permissions on your phone.
If the above is already all enabled, then i have a suggestion to see if this is related to SmartThings or issues with the phone and location services maybe dropping. From your wife’s phone go into IFTTT and create 2 New Applets using the Trigger Service “Location”. Do one for when you enter an area and one for when you exit an area (don’t use the option for exit and enter because you won’t know which is which). Make sure to setup the geofencing perimeter as close to what you have setup in your SmartThings Location Geofence perimeter. Then select something like Notification or Email for the Action Service ( don’t perform an action in ST - Leave ST out of anything in the equation). Leave these Applets on and monitor for the notifications, emails received during the week. If your wife is home with her phone and she is receiving the “you have exited the perimeter” or she is home and she receives multiple “you have entered the perimeter” messages when she never left, this would tell me that it’s totally phone related and nothing to do with ST.
Do you and the wife have the same model phone?
I had a Droid Maxx when I first purchased ST and I was having issues with it telling me that my presence sensor was away when my phone was sitting on the table right next to the hub. I played with the geofencing perimeter size in ST, I made sure that all the app permissions were enabled, no battery saving app optimization, etc… Anyway I moved on to a Motorola z Force droid and have not had a single problem since.
Had the same issue a few weeks ago. Tech support suggested to make the area for the geofencing of the home a little bigger. Seems to have helped.
The reason I don’t think that’s an issue is that they have multiple phones using the same Geofence perimeter for their location and his phone is not having an issue. That’s why I asked the question if they both have the same phone model. If they are using different phones, then maybe her phone is more sensitive and warrants a change to the perimeter size being a little larger. If they have different phones, I would say that’s a great suggestion worth trying before implementing the Applets I recommended for testing.
Great suggestions folks…
Yes we both have the same model phones.
I went into the battery settings again Thurs early morning and told the app to always use full battery and never be monitored. rather than leaving it at the first screen unchecked. Since doing that her phone has actually been updating even though its only been 24 hours.
My phone which never had a problem I made that same change as well just to keep them the same. I’ll continue to monitor and if further issue happens I’ll continue with some of the other suggestions to try and track this done.
Thanks again folks for the help
Just wanted to update all, so far no further issues with presence. I have expanded the home area a bit, rebuilt the wife’s phone and since doing that its been rock solid.
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My SO also has an S7 and it has gotten steadily worse and worse. My Pixel XL and 6P have needed removed and re-added every few months since I started using ST, but the last time re-added it, it only lasted about 2 weeks before location started getting crappy again. Both phones have now gotten to the point that the alarm just randomly turns on and off on us all day as our phones “leave” and “arrive,” even though nobody goes anywhere.
I contacted support and without any real consideration, they suggested using Life360 instead. Between the alarm triggering constantly and the Google Home outage over the weekend, it’s not been a great HA experience lately. I can only imagine the argument that would ensue when telling the SO that on top of all this, I now want her to install a “Locator App” to make SmartThings work.
Tasker has been doing this stuff for years, I don’t understand why it’s so difficult, or at least why we can’t have a simple “refresh my location” button somewhere.
Support suggested to me to reboot my hub. I thought that was a crap response, but it worked without having to rebuild the phones as presence sensors.
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My wife’s blackberry is having issues too. Without opening app, best it gets is a day or 2 before it stops recognizing condition changes.
Her life360 is working just fine though…
So I lied apparently. Samsung Galaxy S6 edge continues to have constant issues and others have reported similar issues with Samsungs following the app update.
This may or may not resolve your issue but there’s a bug in the Google app itself that is causing issues primarily with Tasker plugins but there’s a few other things it’s affecting too. For me that included presence detection with SmartThings. You might need to downgrade the Google app to 7.1.28.21. You can read about the bug here:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+IanGrodyRules/posts/MduC3cA1vHM
And download the working version of Google from here:
http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/google-search/google-search-7-1-28-release/google-app-7-1-28-21-arm-android-apk-download/
If you want to try this you’ll need to uninstall updates to the Google app from the Play Store, click the 3 dot menu and uncheck auto-update. Then install the Google app you downloaded from above (make sure allow unknown sources to be installed is turned on in your phone settings).
Can’t say for sure this will fix any of your issues but it worked for me.
Edit: This bug doesn’t affect all users. My wife’s Turbo 2 and a Moto X we have work fine but it did hit me (s6) and everyone else in the linked post above.
I have been having presence sensor issues as well with both ios and android. The issue being is that smartthings will think we have left and run certain routines. However it will reflect our presence as being there the entire time under the family tab.