Replacement for Life360 (multiple geolocations) for iPhone? (2024)

SmartApps & Automations
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I used to use Life360 locations in routines (“when someone gets to the harbor after being away 1 hour and nobody’s home, turn on the downstairs A/C to 24°”, “when I get to any of these airports and the ‘on island’ switch is on, set to Away mode and turn ‘on island’ switch off”, etc.).

Most family members use iPhones, so if Linked Locations can do this on Samsung devices, that won’t help me.

Any ideas about how to use geolocations that are unrelated to the hub’s location, especially solutions that don’t involve an IFTT subscription?

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Since you have iPhones, I’ve used Geofency for several years and really like it. I use Mine with ibeacons, but you can also identify places of interest based on longitude and latitude.

Geofency can issue a web hook when you get to a location (which they call POI for “place of interest ). So you need a second app to receive that webhook and then tell smartthings about it. Probably SharpTools in your case.

Here is the FAQ that explains the process I use. Just ignore the part about the physical ID beacons: you’re going to use the “receiving station app” (geofency) recognize the location it’s in and then everything else is the same.

FAQ: IBeacon Short FAQ (2024) (US AND UK)

I’m sure there are other alternatives as well, but this is the one I use.

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I switched to using Alexa for my location tracking after the demise of Life360. It supports multiple locations so it recognizes when I’m at home vs when we’re at our second home. The downside is that because I use virtual presence sensors to proxy the Alexa location into ST, I have to have a separate presence sensor for each location I want to trigger behaviors in ST. So, I have my normal virtual presence sensor for when I’m at home and a second virtual presence sensor when I’m at our 2nd house. It’s a simple setup if you don’t have to track too many locations or too many people. Probably a pain for more than a few of either.

Following on what @JDRoberts said, if the geotracking app you use can call a webhook, you could use it to set a text field in the Aplicaciones Virtuales Mc driver Applications: Number Fields and Basic Calculations for the POI. That way you could write Routines in ST based on the value in the text field like:

If Away mode for 1 hour (precondition)
    Text field1 is "Harbor"
Then
    Set Downstairs A/C to 24 deg

Each text field device can have up to five fields so it could support, for instance, the location for five different individuals Or you might have the device represent a person and use the text fields to represent your different locations and write something in the location text field to signal if you are at that location or not. And you can call the ST API directly to set the values so you don’t need to rely on another tool to get the info into ST.

Another variation on the Alexa solution would be to create virtual presence sensors for each POI and again use a geotracking app that can call webhooks to set the state of the virtual presence sensors by calling the ST API directly.

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Haven’t they implemented Linked Places on the iPhone app then? After a long period of being exclusive to Galaxy phones they’ve been available on the Android app for quite some time now.

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