It could be either or both of the issues. That is, it could be the way your phone detects your presence, in which case it would impact anything using your phone as a presence indicator, including life 360 and IFTTT presence. It could be something specific to SmartThings. Or it could be a combination of these.
For example, if you move and take your router with you, it will typically take your phone service provider couple of weeks before it knows that your home address has changed. Nothing to do with SmartThings. So for a couple of weeks, everything that you do that uses Geopresence based on your home router will be off.
Some people live in an apartment (this is typically a big city problem) which is exactly equidistant from three different cell towers. This can completely throw off your presence. And there isn’t really anything you can do about it. Then once you get to the office, where you are closer to one cell tower than the others, everything will work fine again.
These issues all have to do with how do your presence is calculated by phones. It’s not all GPS, because as was already noted, GPS can’t find you inside a building.
Instead, there is a Geopresence algorithm (it varies slightly from manufacturer to manufacturer) which takes into account the last cell tower that your phone connected to and uses a database with those street addresses as one input into your location calculation.
If there’s only one cell tower near where you are, no problem. Your location will be identified pretty cleanly.
But if there are multiple cell towers, your phone may connect to first one and then to another and that can cause your location to look like you moved by a mile or more even when you didn’t.
So the location calculation starts with GPS, but that can only work when you’re outdoors, and it’s expensive in terms of battery life to use it continuously. So they throw in cell tower location and use the database look up. But that can get thrown off by the fact that your phone might connect to different cell towers when you yourself haven’t physically moved . So then they throw in connection to your own home router, which can help with precision a lot, but gets thrown off completely if you physically move the router to a new building. At least for a while.
Sometimes it’s just a matter of trying different services until you find the one whose Geopresence algorithm happens to fit the place where you spend most of your time.
Also, it should be noted that just having different features turned on or off on your phone, and how you allow cellular data to be used, and also affect the Geopresence calculation. This is sometimes the reason why one person’s phone works fine for Geopresence and another person in the same household finds that it doesn’t work for them.
https://support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us/articles/204744424-Known-mobile-presence-issues-and-FAQ
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