Smartthings / Life360 Connect stopped working (11 Jan 2023)

Presence has been challenging from the beginning with ST: again, not sure why.

IF you can find a presence method from another app/device that is reliable for you and you can get that information over to SmartThings, then you can use a virtual presence sensor to visually represent each person in the SmartThings app. That will be enough for some people, not everyone. :disappointed_relieved:

Since the IFTTT integration is broken right now, that leaves out some options, but there are still some choices if you want to try any.

  1. the Alexa app. This has become surprisingly popular. If you put the Alexa app on your phone, it has its own presence option that can trigger its own routines. (Alexa routines, not SmartThings routines.) and then you use that Alexa routine to turn on a virtual presence sensor in smartthings. It’s quite straightforward, easy to set up, free, if you have a prime account (I don’t remember if it works if you don’t have a prime account or not.) Integration with smartthings is good. Works on both iOS and android. So it might be worth looking into.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=G2PYLKJN3XVZ55EQ

Since it turned out that Life360 was selling user location data, (Google it if you want details, there have been a lot of news stories about it), your privacy should actually be a little better with this option than it was with Life360.

  1. if you have an android phone, you should be able to get presence via Tasker to sharptools to Smartthings. That using two third party apps and setup is more complicated than the Alexa app, but there are people using this method who like it.

  2. if you have an iPhone and HomeKit presence works well for you, you can get an inexpensive meross smart plug and use it as a proxy, since it is visible to both systems at the same time. You use HomeKit presence to turn the plug on with a HomeKit routine and then have that plug coming on trigger a smartthings routine. This is very easy to set up and the only cost is a $10-$15 smart plug per person. I use this method myself, and it works very well for me. Here’s an FAQ on that:

You can use any brand of smart plug which is visible to both platforms at the same time.

  1. detect your phone connecting to your Wi-Fi and use that to turn on your virtual presence sensor. This is not a native feature in smartthings, but there are people using it. There are several options. Again, the combination of Tasker and sharptools will work for those with android phones. You could use HomeKit to turn on a smart plug like option three. Or @taustin has a code that can do this in smartthings, but you will have to set up a separate device as a 24/7 server and it’s technically somewhat complicated.

  2. The downside of using any phone based system is that if you turn your phone off, the system will think that your away. That’s an issue for some people, not others.

There is no commercially available replacement for the original smart things Zigbee presence fob, which was supposed to address that aspect, but turned out to be unreliable for a lot of people. If you do want to use a physical device other than a phone, there aren’t a lot available right now, but you could use a ibeacon. I used this before I switched to the HomeKit option with the smart plug proxy.

The problem is that you need some way of receiving a webhook in order to integrate this to smartthings. The easiest way used to be Ifttt, but since it’s broken right now, that makes things more complicated.

I’m going to go ahead and link to the FAQ for the method I use, but you won’t be able to follow those instructions until the Ifttt Integration is working again, unless you find your own method of receiving webhooks.

iBeacons+iOS+SmartThings (UK) presence [updated in 2023]

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So I think those are the most popular methods right now for people who find that the native smartthings Geopresence doesn’t work for them. :thinking:

I don’t know if any of those will fit your situation, but some might be worth a look.