Hi everyone,
I have a question that’s been bothering me for a while, and I’m hoping someone here might have some advice.
Like many of you, I use automations with geolocation — specifically, I have one that triggers when coming home or leaving home to set a certain occupancy mode. My “home” zone is set with a 200m radius.
Here’s the issue: I recently switched from iOS to Android. On iOS, geolocation always worked flawlessly — entering or leaving the zone triggered the automation almost immediately, and I had a parallel notification to confirm that.
But on Android, I’m having trouble figuring out the best settings for location sensors. While the automation does usually trigger, it doesn’t seem to happen exactly when entering or leaving the zone. Compared to iOS, there’s a noticeable delay — often several tens of meters.
That alone wouldn’t be a big problem, but the more serious issue is that sometimes, even when I’m already home and connected to the local network, the geolocation briefly jumps to a location several hundred meters away — just for 5 to 10 seconds — and then corrects itself. This causes the automation to switch to “away” mode. It’s really frustrating when the lights turn off, security mode is activated, covers are closed, and so on — all while I’m actually still home.
On iOS, I was using Apple’s Home app for geolocation automation, which worked really well. I combined it with a Home Assistant input_boolean to control home/away status. Unfortunately, there’s no equivalent on Android, so as a workaround, I now have an automation that only triggers if the home > away state persists for at least 5 minutes.
I hope I explained everything clearly. Has anyone else experienced this issue with Android geolocation? Do you have any tips for configuring the Android Companion App to make geolocation more reliable?
Thanks in advance!
