Rename Presence Device

Apps & Clients iOS
1

My wife and both have iPhones logged into SmartThings for presence. Everything works however both of our devices are named iPhone. I renamed my iPhone (in iOS settings) but it still shows in SmartThings as iPhone. Is there a way to rename the presence device?

2

There is no way to edit it in the ST app. I doubt you would be able to edit it in IDE since it uses the new architecture with Placeholder as the Device Type.

My guess is - you would need to remove the current Presence sensor and add it back since you changed the name on the iPhone and it should pick that up. Note: doing this may wipe out any Routines that use it. You could create a virtual Presence sensor and substitute it in the routines in place of the real one. turn off get location for this iphone in the app, restart the iPhone, then go back into the app and enable get location for this iphone. check if it shows the new name. edit our routines and replace the virtual presence sensor with the real one.

3

Thanks for the recommendation. Unfortunately nothing seems to work. I unchecked using my phone for location. I uninstalled the SmartThings app and reinstalled it. It always just wants to name my device iPhone even though my device has a different name

I also tried using the IDE to rename the device but since the device is listed as placeholder it doesn’t really work.

Any other ideas? I haven’t checked but can the CLI rename a device?

Thanks

4

smartthings devices:rename

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5

It looks like using the CLI to rename the device does work.

Thanks everyone!

6

How long does it take for the new name to show up on the app? For me it was still showing the generic name after giving it a minute

7

You can rename advanced on my.smartthings. But how to determine which id. Device id is who?

8

I’m assuming that the question refers to the mobile presence devices in the iOS app? Android users have it easier as the SmartThings app uses the system/Bluetooth name of the phone/tablet as the device label. There will be duplicate entries for each of the devices belonging to the the user logged in to the Advanced Web App (AWA) but you ignore the ones that aren’t in a Location (and that also have the ‘mobile as a thing’ presentation rather than the ‘mobile presence’ one).

When it comes to the iOS app I believe everything gets labelled as ‘iPhone’ and the AWA has a different idea of what the useful data to present to the user is than I do. You can turn detective though. For example:

  • Any ‘iPhone’ device not in a Location is not your mobile presence device. It is the parent of the AWA user’s mobile presence devices but unfortunately the AWA doesn’t reveal that.
  • You can look at the main presenceSensor attribute of each device and correlate that with the known presence or otherwise of your devices, and when they last arrived or left.
  • You can create Member Location based Routines for each of your devices and then look to see which device shows those Routines under ‘In Use By’ in the AWA.

That sort of thing. You may be thinking that each User ought to have a uunique ID, and that every device should reference their owner by ID. As it happens users do have unique IDs (two actually) and unless they are particularly old devices do have an owner ID. Unfortunately that info isn’t surfaced in the AWA.

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