[SOLVED] Android reporting incorrect presence after wireless router or home location change

I will try this. I currently use life360 and android presence together. Today i modified my routines and pistons to use just life360.

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new router could be unrelated, as you guess.

Based on some odd WLAN stuff I’ve seen, I’d try turning off the “hidden SSID” attribute and see if the behaviour changes.

Life360 sounds better but I’ve never tried it.

The fact that he didn’t mention that he made any modifications to the phone since this began to happen, I was saving the steps for battery / app optimization, permissions, and location settings until after he performed the steps above if that doesn’t resolve his issue :slight_smile:

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My SSID is brodcasted, not hidden.
Life360 has other problems, it works well for me, but not for my wife.

She travels by train and when the train gets close to my house it changes to arrived and when she reaches the station it becomes away. Then she walks back home, it will stay as departed until a few mins after she reached home.

I have tried the following steps till now.

  1. Restarted the phone.
  2. Deleted android presence from smartthings and re-added it.
  3. Increased the radius.
  4. Cleared cache on the android app.
  5. reset the hub.

None of these made any difference. My wife’s phone didn’t do this till the hub was reset. Now her phone is also behaving the same.
Strangely the issue didn’t happen all last night, but started again this morning.

Ya I dunno. You have read from some how unreliable it is and doesn’t work for some and others, they don’t have any issues, in many threads out on the community. I personally use Android, with a single mobile phone setup, and no other integrations with it and mine works pretty reliably. One thing to check as it was stated earlier, make sure that both phones have High Accuracy turned on for Location Services. In Android we have other things to consider like App optimization that may or may not affect things and app permissions, not sure if there are equivalent settings in iOS. I was looking at another thread from '16 ( I will post below). I will also post a Test that you could setup to determine if it’s a SmartThings issue or specific to the phone(s). The other thread did mention separate accounts for each phone, so I’m not sure what others have experienced around that. Take a look at the other thread and if you can’t find a viable solution setup the quick test scenario at the bottom.

Test Scenario:

Taking ST completely out of the equation, setup two Applets in IFTTT:

Trigger Service = Location
Action Service = Email, GMail, or Notifications

For simplicity sake, just test from your phone right now.

Go into IFTTT and create two Applets:

  1. Select Location for Trigger, Select “You enter an area” and adjust the perimeter to the same size you set in ST. Then select an Action service to send you an email or notification “Your phone has entered the perimeter”.

2 Select Location for Trigger, Select “You exit an area” and adjust the perimeter to the same size you set in ST. Then select an Action service to send you an email or notification “Your phone has left the building”.

If you start receiving messages that you have exited the perimeter when you never left home or multiple entered the perimeter messages via IFTTT (same as ST) this could be an indication that it’s phone related. Leave the Presence setup alone in ST. I would figure that if it’s a phone issue, you would receive one message or push notification from ST and one message from IFTTT around the same time.

Just a thought at trying to help in determining, eliminate or include the source of where the issue might stem from.

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Thanks very much for the detailed instructions. I already have memory and battery management disabled for smartthings. It is not in high accuracy mode though. Life 360 is on high accuracy. I have my wife’s phone and my phone on different smartthings accounts.

I have setup the ifttt trigger last night like you suggested. It has never ran till now. My smartthings android presence says, I have left and arrived 14 times already today. Each time it triggers a departed, it changes to arrived within 2 mins. My wife’s mobile presence reports that she left and arrived twice today. Strangely once when it marked as departed, both mine and my wife’s presence changed at exactly the same time and also the life 360 presence. This has only happened once. All the rest of the occurrences are pretty random and only happen with the smartthings mobile presence.

Is there a way to set some tolerance of 5 mins on the mobile presence where it is only triggered after 5 mins if still in that state? In that case all these false alarms will be captured.

Not sure why this is happening now, I have had the presence quite stable till now with false alarms once in a while.

So you didn’t get a single notification from either of the IFTTT Applets? Did you receive the appropriate Notifications when either of your phones did leave or enter the perimeter (from IFTTT)? Just to completely rule out your phones being an issue, setup two additional Applets using Life360 as the Trigger Service. If the results are as expected there, I would go back to ST with all this information and raise this issue. There are a ton of people who have similar issues. It’s beyond me exactly why this happens for some and not others.

Thanks for your response. Looks like my IFTTT triggers are not working as they haven’t triggered when I actually left and entered the perimeter.

I have currently set it up to add an entry in a google spreadsheet. I have changed it to send me an email now. Will update how it goes… but getting frustrated with all the false alarms at the moment.

SmartThings app mobile presence isn’t great. IFTTT is far worse. I used to have an IFTTT mobile presence boundary that I used to turn my Vacation Mode switch off when I came within about 100 miles of my house. Even at this range, the accuracy was spotty. The applet ran more than once when I was halfway across the country, and frequently showed me leaving and arriving when I was less than 10 miles from home.

Here’s an alternative if you feel like going down a different route…

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Thanks very much Chris, I am going to try this. I think my problem is that android is reporting wrong location as in the below thread. Is that’s the case, wouldn’t I still have the same problem with this approach?

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I am now almost convienced that my problem is not smartthings and it is android location. I got 1 false alarm yesterday and IFTTT also triggered at the same time. Also I checked my life360 history and see that couple of time over the last 3 days it reported wrong locations around 5 to 25 miles away from my home.

The below post on google forums suggest that google takes some time to fix the location on the wifi. As I just installed a new router and reset my IP address, I think I have to use it for a couple of weeks before google fixes the location properly.
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/tRs9WNAWt_4

Thanks everyone, especially @WB70 for helping me find out the root cause. I will update the thread how it goes in the next couple of weeks.

Interesting article here which says changing the Wifi SSID may help. I will give this a try in the weekend.

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FYI @sapstar.

I had passed this thread information over to another guy who just recently moved 5 miles away (he didn’t buy a new router tho) and he was having what looked like to be a very similar issue to yours. He went ahead and modified the SSID(s) and that appears to have resolved the issue. Here’s the thread:

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This to me is one of those types of issues that should be in an official FAQ or Troubleshooting guide for Android Mobile Presence. Looking at the cross referencing of all the other types of Presence issues in and around SmartThings and the time people spend chasing their tails in trying to resolve something that in the end turns out to be something so simple and in this case, not a SmartThings issue at all, I look at the ROI that could have been saved or greatly minimized as far as the 400 things that a person has to try and isolate this problem. Now I know there are other scenarios where ST is involved or has something to do with the issue: ie: Mobile Presence with multiple ST locations, and IOS Presence reporting. But when you mix those issues, although they might be similar in nature to the overall issue that someone is complaining about and the community trys to help by giving them 500 solutions or tests to try that cover the scope of ALL the issues it gets pretty frustrating as an end user.

ST Mobile Presence with Android - Inconsistent / Incorrect reporting of Present and Away Status for a single location:

  1. Are you using an Android Mobile device for Presence within ST?
  2. Is your ST setup to use only a single Location?
  3. Did you verify these permissions?
  4. Did you check App Optimization?
  5. Did you recently move or change location?
  6. If you moved or changed location, are the SSIDs the same as what you used before?

List of specific symptoms:

  1. xxxxx
  2. xxxxx
  3. xxxxx

Solution steps:

  1. Modify permissions
  2. Modify xxxxxx
  3. Change the names of all your Router SSIDs

Is there an official place where a complete and detailed document is published that defines a specific solution for known and repeated reported issues so that someone could reference that before searching endlessly through all these threads to maybe resolve an issue in 1 / 100th of the time?

JD chime in here.

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Thanks very much for the update. I will be back home tomorrow night. Will try to sort mine out on Friday. Its a hassle changing all the SSID’s as I have to change them in around 20 devices.

May be i will just change the 5Ghz netwrok on which the laptops and mobiles connect. That way only a few devices need to change.

I haven’t tried this, so I’m just throwing it out there. If changing the SSID fools the hub into thinking its at a new location and if the hub doesn’t cache past router settings, can you just connect to a different router temporarily? Once the hub sets up to the new location, then change back to the original. You can use your phone’s hotspot for a temporary router.

It wouldn’t be difficult to try and a lot easier than changing your SSID if it worked.

From the article above, it’s not the ST Hub that is the issue or having to try and fool it. It’s how your SSID / MAC is being stored within Google Location. Now how long that takes to update is another question. For it not to happen in the future, the opt out in Google is to add _nomap to the end of your SSID. Gotta love that.

It only takes a few minutes to change the SSID, even if you have a router with multiple bands. My Nighthawk has one 2.4ghz, two 5ghz and a Guest. It takes more time reconnecting all your devices back to the router under the new names given.

My location issues seem to be fixed now. Haven’t happened after Wednesday. I haven’t changed my SSID yet.

You fixed the issue with patience?

Actually I work away from home Monday to Thursday. It was my wife’s patience :wink:. Also it didn’t seem to happen at night.