So this morning around 3:48am my entry lights went on. Apparently, after having been home for 10 hours and the phone plugged in (at my nightstand, next to me) for over six hours, the SmartThings app suddenly decided it was home.
I was having Android presence issues for about 10 days when support finally, (after the 3rd contact) noticed that my iPad was logged into the ST app. The app wasn’t running but I had launched the app and logged in at about the same time with my one and only user account and from there, neither of our presence would work. Once I logged out from my iPad, presence is now working. My point is, there are lots of things in play here. FWIW, support said I should create a separate userid/pswd for my iPad to keep this from happening in the future.
Agree, still some weirdness going on, like long delay when editing a device in the IDE, can’t delete my old Android phones no matter what I do…
Glad you system wasn’t tied to a siren, that would have been rude
My Wife and I use Life360. She’s on an iPhone and I’m on Android. I started using it because ST Geofencing is unrealiable. Now, however, Everything is unreliable. Life360 isn’t working as well as it once did. Presence sensors are working right, it’s the people with phones that aren’t working right. Here’s a thread I started to see if anyone is having issues. My android wasn’t having any problems until this past weekend.
This one might not be the ST fault. The location determination on Android phones can be flaky. I have other apps that use location to do something such as Tasker, and occasionally they will trigger because the Android location service said I had moved. I’ve looked at the map on my phone at times and it will have me a mile or so away from my house!
As a guess here since I’m not an Android expert, its an unfortunate side effect of trying to reduce power consumption or of losing the GPS signal. If you look at the settings -> location on your phone there is a Mode at the top and even if you set it to “high accuracy” the description still says “use GPS, Wi-Fi, bluetooth, or cellular networks to determine location”. For low power the Android OS will turn off the GPS and use one of the other means, such as detecting a nearby cell tower. Or if it loses the GPS signal it has to use some other mode. Either way, those aren’t as accurate and sometimes they get it way wrong.
I used Tasker to create my own presence monitor; it only declares me away when the GPS says I am away and my home wifi signal is not detected. However this involved setting up a virtual switch and was overall a bit of a pain to do. I don’t know why ST doesn’t have an option to declare you at home if it detects your home wifi SSID.
This last option seems like it would 100% reduce any complaints about geofencing if it was used in conjunction with current ST geofencing implementations.
I know Android has an API to call on the wifi network status so this would be a REALLY easy win for ST.
when my phone had been plugged in at home for six hours before ST suddenly ran the arrival routine.
If the location services caused the phone to believe it had left and then returned, that would explain it.
Or it could be broken behavior on the part of ST. One possible way to tell is to look at the notification log from ST on your phone. If you see the a mode change to away and then home, it was probably the location service on your phone. If you usually have mode changes in the log but there were none at the time this happened, then probably a ST bug/feature.