Is there a way to use an iPhone as a presence sensor, without giving that person access to control your hub?
For children, guest, etc., I would like to use the phone as the sensor, but I really don’t want everyone having access to control my hub. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
At this point I can’t think of a way except to use an alternate presence App like Life360 which integrates with SmartThings.
I actually don’t think it’s necessary for the IPhone in question to have the SmartThings app installed on it at all. I discovered this quite by accident when adding a child’s phone as a presence sensor. He actually has 2 phones only one of which has the app installed yet both showed up to be added as presence sensors.
That’s not likely what’s happening.
SmartThings updates presence by sending the geolocation data of the phone to the SmartThings Cloud using the SmartThings App installed on the phone. It can’t do this unless the App is installed and logged in.
Alternate presence sensing using a Router script, and various other methods are possible, but need to be explicitly manually set up.
Interesting, maybe what I experienced was a fluke. Sorry for the mis-information. I learn something new everyday.