I am new to this ST & Home automation world. I recently bought and set up a ST network at home and set my smart phone as presence sensor which I use it to turn the lights in the front door off when I leave and turn on when I arrive home. But it has some problem.
It keep telling me I left the house and come back right away while I am still at home. You know when I arrive home, the lights are on till I turn it off.
From last night till now, the Mobile app told me that I
Has left Home at 11:25pm and Has arrived at home at 11:26pm
Has left home at 3:52am and has arrived at home at 3:52am
Has left home at 8:08am and has arrived home at 8:15am
Has left home at 9:55am and has arrived home at 9:55am
Has left home at 1:16pm and has arrived home at 1:18pm.
But I was always at home! What’s wrong with it?
Cell phone’s GPS? Hub? Internet connection?
I have a ticket in with support regarding the iOS app. They said they have been getting reports since the latest update of a lot of presence issues and they are looks into it. Haven’t heard any more, though.
I have had ST for almost 1 year now and using my Android phone it has always acted like this. I increased the presence circle around my house and have the LEAVE HOME delay set at 12 minutes now.
When locked on to your home Wifi it would be nice if ST would stay at HOME!
My presence was working perfectly on iOS until that last app update. For iOS at least, be sure to leave your wifi on all the time. Wifi plays a huge part in iOS location.
These false exits are a known issue with Google’s native geofence on Android and there seems to be a slight uptake in their incidence since 5.1 came to the Nexus phones. We’re still investigating that uptick.
The problem occurs when the phone momentarily loses it wifi connection, due to interference or for some other reason. The bug is that on some phones this causes the phone’s geofence subsystem to think it’s location has jumped to the nearest cell tower, sometimes just for a few seconds but sometimes for several minutes. Unless the geofence radius is very large, this will trigger a momentary exit event. We do take steps in the code to deal with this problem but since we can’t ever by certain an exit event is a false exit and not a real exit, there is only so much we can do.
If your phone has this problem, there are a couple ways to mitigate. You should definitely turn up the “Geofence Delay” setting under the My Account to 2, 3 or 5 minutes. If that doesn’t work, increasing you geofence to cover your cell tower location (perhaps a mile radius) should do the trick, though obviously that may not be an ideal solution.
I’d just like to note that I have having major presence issues on 4.4.4. I am on high accuracy, have a large geofence and have a 2 min delay.
I understand how those items would help with preventing false exits. How can I increase reliability for returning home? My issue is that ST isn’t seeing me as home, sometimes for several hours after I get home. Even when my other apps see me as home.
Guys - we’re committed to solving these problems. We’re engaged in ongoing internal testing of mobile presence issues but understand that only a small percentage of phones see these problems, and even then it’s intermittent. So any reporting you do of these problems will be helpful.
Please do send support@smartthings.com an e-mail with a full description of your mobile presence issue as well as information about your phone. Here’s what I’d find helpful in trying to isolate the cause of the problem(s). Many of these are Android specific, but the same principle applies to iOS mobile presence issues.
About the phone:
Make & model
OS level
Whether the phone has been rooted.
Whether you use Tasker
Any other location aware apps you are using. E.g. Life360.
About your mobile presence:
Your Geofence Delay setting (if different than default 1 minute)
Your geofence radius, if different than default. (Note that default is 450 meters, minimum is 150 meters)
How many locations your have (with geofences) and whether they are all affected.
Whether you’ve logged out, powered off the phone, or disabled Location services recently. (Note that logging out of a device will disable that device as a presence device until you log back in, and, obviously, a phone won’t act as a presence device while it’s powered off. Disabling location services will, of course, disable geofence (mobile presence) capability as well.
Nature of the problem:
Whether you are experiencing false exits, Mobile presence entirely not working, or whether it occasional misses events, or whether the events are delayed, and how much.
Specify if they are enter or exit events, or both
Any other relevant information about the problem – E.g. if the problem is a long delay in the event being fired, then did you get the event to fire by opening the app or by waking up the phone, or was it still sleeping.
I do already have an ongoing ticket with support regarding android presence. Most of the questions you asked were already asked by the support agent. But I sent them in again anyway just to be sure. Here are my answers if it helps here.
About the phone:
Make & model Motorola Droid MAXX
OS level 4.4.4
Whether the phone has been rooted. no
Whether you use Tasker no
Any other location aware apps you are using. E.g. Life360. Waze, drop cam, google maps
About your mobile presence:
Your Geofence Delay setting (if different than default 1 minute) 2 min
Your geofence radius, if different than default. (Note that default is 450 meters, minimum is 150 meters) 651ft
How many locations your have (with geofences) and whether they are all affected. 2 locations with geofence. iOS works flawlessly on both locations. Android is only set up for one and it doesn’t work reliably
Whether you’ve logged out, powered off the phone, or disabled Location services recently. (Note that logging out of a device will disable that device as a presence device until you log back in, and, obviously, a phone won’t act as a presence device while it’s powered off. Disabling location services will, of course, disable geofence (mobile presence) capability as well. I have not logged out, I reboot the phone maybe every other day. Location is on high accuracy
Nature of the problem:
Whether you are experiencing false exits, Mobile presence entirely not working, or whether it occasional misses events, or whether the events are delayed, and how much. Leaving the geofence is working much more reliably in the last few days. It does not work for returning.
Specify if they are enter or exit events, or both typically enter only
Any other relevant information about the problem – E.g. if the problem is a long delay in the event being fired, then did you get the event to fire by opening the app or by waking up the phone, or was it still sleeping. I can occasionally fix presence by opening ST app, but it doesn’t always fix it. My other apps are showing me at home, while ST does not. Also occasionally when I open ST to manually call “I’m back” the App will crash. I have not noticed any consistency on the failures related to the phone being awake or asleep.
Any other location aware apps you are using. E.g. google maps, 1weather,
About your mobile presence:
Your Geofence Delay setting (if different than default 1 minute) 5 min
Your geofence radius, if different than default. (Note that default is 450 meters, minimum is 150 meters) half a mile
How many locations your have (with geofences) and whether they are all affected. 1
Whether you’ve logged out, powered off the phone, or disabled Location services recently. (Note that logging out of a device will disable that device as a presence device until you log back in, and, obviously, a phone won’t act as a presence device while it’s powered off. Disabling location services will, of course, disable geofence (mobile presence) capability as well. I have not logged out, always on. Location is on high accuracy
Nature of the problem:
Whether you are experiencing false exits, Mobile presence entirely not working, or whether it occasional misses events, or whether the events are delayed, and how much. The app reported false location many times, like 7-8 times today that I left and arrived, but I was at home whole day!!
Specify if they are enter or exit events, or both Both
Any other relevant information about the problem – E.g. if the problem is a long delay in the event being fired, then did you get the event to fire by opening the app or by waking up the phone, or was it still sleeping. I can occasionally fix presence by opening ST app, but it doesn’t always fix it.
Hi Q : Wondering if you submitted this to support? If so, awesome! If not, please do, as they’ll be keeping track of all those answers.
Thanks guys! Support is our way to fasttrack information to the engineers. I’d like to keep the forums as more of a place for discussions amongst peers.
Edit - just wanted to update everyone that I changed my android location monitoring to battery saving instead of high accuracy and have had ZERO issues with android presence since then. It comes with the cost of not being able to use GPS apps in the car without making the switch back to high accuracy after ST l sees you leave and of course changing back to battery saver mode before you get close to your house. Thought this might help some other people. And yes I have notified support of my findings.
FYI, yes, my own homespun version of this (looking for devices ON the local wifi network) works great, and since it’s not on the phone itself doesn’t require any mojo on the phone - works for android, ios, whatever you have that associates to your local wifi when you are home…
