I have a presence routine that is setup so anytime someone comes home between about sunset to about sunrise that it triggers our porch lights to turn on and stay on for 20 minutes.
It makes it nice for us when we take care of groceries late at night and then take care of the car if need be (detached garage).
I’ve had problems in the past with this triggering as well (back then it either wouldn’t trigger at all or way to late), but about a year and a half ago I increased our Home Distance in the App (the “Get your location from this phone” setting) from 150m to 250m and then to 500m.
The 500m setting finally seemed to be the sweet spot and it would trigger right as we got to our driveway.
The problem I have now has been going on for about a month now. I can’t seem to track down what the problem is, but I can prove it isn’t working as intended.
Now the problem is when we are already home (we all could be home for hours) the routine will randomly trigger and activate. I’ve tried to see if it was a particular person’s phone, but nope.
All of our phone have done it at least a couple times each. I setup seperate routines to prove this by notifying me which one of our devices triggered the home routine when it does activate.
I’ve also changed the routine to only trigger if we are away for at least 10 minutes and even then it ignores this requirement as I have also setup seperate routines to notify me when someone gets home after being away for at least 10 minutes (this routine never gets triggered when the lights come routine is activated, unless we truly were away for more then 10 minutes).
All other routines work except for these few, and what I mean is the presence detection one without the 10 minute requirement is coming on randomly and only the light routine is not following the requirement of being away for at least 10 minutes.
P.S.- I’ve already deleted and rebuild the automation routines fresh and they are still doing this. Also I’ve been playing with increasing/decrease my home distance to trigger the routine and that still hasn’t helped. I’m truly at a lost at what is happening.
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It doesn’t help that Routines use an undocumented rule condition to implement the away for ten minutes, but it was always the case that the away for ten minutes just referred to the previous change. So if someone was away for ten minutes, came home and hasn’t left the house for several days, that still counts as being present after being away for ten minutes.
Again, unless something has changed over the years, ‘someone has arrived’ actually means that someone is present after the routine is triggered by either an arrival or departure, and you have to take other steps to determine if someone has actually arrived.
So are you actually seeing the phones changing from present to not present when they haven’t moved? Do they change back to present again? Just a blip would be enough to trigger a Routine.
I believe that Android geofences use Wi-Fi and cell towers rather than GPS. So you might like to consider if anything Wi-Fi has changed.
I will get you this info next time it happens just to make sure I can get screenshots and more recent documentations even though it has happened within the last 24 hours. I have already gave access to my account before and you should still have access and yes my email that I login with is the same as the one for my account.
Since I upgraded my mesh Wi-Fi and started using Wi-Fi 7 with Multi-link (MLO), I’ve been getting false geo-tracking events from the Alexa app (which I use for my location tracking). Apparently this is a known issue since Android relies more heavily on Wi-Fi for location tracking.
I did have a routine that I have since deleted as it was getting annoying to hear it go off during the day, but yes I was seeing the phones say they have left and then become present again, but within 1 minute.
So as an example I have 4 routines (I’m not including night time: sunset to sunrise in these just FYI):
Someone left notify me
Someone returned notify me.
Someone returned after being away for 10 minutes notify me.
Someone return after being away for 10 minutes turn on porch lights.
Routine 1 would trigger, then routines 2 and 4 would trigger about a minute later. Routine 3 would never trigger.
This is one of the only things that I thought could be causing the problem. I live in a rural area and we have very few 5G towers most are 4G and poor at best (averaging 10Mbps or less down and .05 up). So I try to keep everyones phones linked to Wi-Fi as much as possible where we have gig down and 40 Mbps up. I did change my Router and AP in January from an Asus to a Ubiquiti and have a weird setup on our property. I have an Asus wireless router connected directly from the cable modem and then I’m running a wire to my Ubiquiti Router which is wired to my Ubiquiti AP. Yes, I know I probably have a double NAT. I use DMZ from my Asus that is first in line that is connected to the modem to expose my Ubiquiti to the Internet and then use Ubiquiti’s Firewall for security. This allows me to isolate my devices from my families so they can’t control them (in the most sense). Then I have a mesh Asus Router mounted high one of our 2 main garages (pole barns) to allow for outdoor internet access where needed and was the only way I could allow access to internet inside the all steel building. My Ubiquiti equipment is directly in the middle of both of these Asus Routers. Then I have a Wi-Fi extender on our other garage just for controlling the garage doors on that building. The only issue I see with my new Ubiquiti devices this way could be interferance, but I would thing this issue would of started in January when I installed them. This hasn’t been the case it has only just started happening within the last 3-5 weeks and I haven’t changed anything new since then.
My new Ubiquiti AP is Wi-Fi 7 and can use MLO, but I’ve have had bad results. I believe it to be related to early adoption/not using the same MLO protocol my devices support. Also since I only have 2 devices that can use MLO (4 if you include my family’s phones, which they aren’t able to be used on my AP as I isolated them to the main wireless router). Those devices include three-Samsung S24 Ultras and only mine is connected to my Ubiquiti AP and a PS5 Pro, which I own but just haven’t setup yet. So, I don’t have much use for it and as of right now only my S24 Ultra has used MLO and I turned it off due to it be slower/unreliable. But again this wouldn’t explain the recent random triggers, especially since my families phones are always on the Asus Wireless Routers and they only support Wi-Fi 6 not 7.
Have you heard anything from the report I sent you via private message 9 days ago about this. It seems to be happening about at least once every 2 days for 2 weeks now.
As a first step, you could try re-linking the service to see if that helps improve the behavior.
Additionally, we saw another case where a user was experiencing a similar issue and mentioned that when opening Maps, the phone location was also showing a different place than the actual one.
Since the SmartThings app uses the location reported by the phone itself, if the phone is providing an incorrect location, that could be triggering this behavior.
Does this always happen early in the morning? If not, it could be useful to compare the phone’s reported location at the exact time when the issue occurs.
Also, the team mentioned they need the app logs to verify what location data was reported from the phone to the SmartThings app. So, the next time this happens, please send us the same information you already shared along with the app logs so we can compare everything properly.
App Logs:
Go to Menu > Gear Icon > About SmartThings
Tap the SmartThings logo 10 times.
This will open the developer’s space > tap ‘report a problem’
This will send you to the report page. Select a frequency and write a short description of the issue.
Click on “Report” and a log file will be generated for you to send over email, please do to build@smartthings.com
It has happened again once, but lately it seems to be another family members phone. Since it’s another members phone wouldn’t I need to do the error report from their phone not mine as that is the one that triggered the event? The last three times it has happened it seems to be their phone only that is triggering the event not anyone else’s like it used to 2 months ago. I know my Phone just updated to One UI 8.5 though and theirs hasn’t yet.