I do not have remote access enabled on home assistant. My wife and I both have the HA app on our phones and I have it on my iPad. When I click on the map in HA it shows 3 entities, my iPhone and iPad and my wife's iPhone. On our phones and the iPad, HA has access to location all the time and background app refresh is turned on. In the HA companion app Location Permission is set to always and accuracy is set to full. The switches under "Update sources" are all toggled on. Under Privacy, I'm not sure whether "Location sent" should be set to exact or zone only.
I understand that without remote access HA is not going to be able to know my location wherever I am, but it seems like it should be able to know whether I am home or not just by whether my phone is connected via wifi. However, even when my wife leaves home, for example, the map still shows 3 entities at home when there are only 2. Last night before I left the house I changed "location sent" under privacy in the HA app on my phone to zone instead of exact and after I came home and I looked at the map in HA this morning it showed only 2 entities. It seems like it knew I left but did not update when I got back.
So the questions are 1. can HA know whether I am home or not without having remote access enabled and 2. If so how do I make that happen beyond the settings I already have?
It is the phone that needs to tell HA it no longer has a connection to wifi, but it cannot.
So what you need is either an integration for your router (although it will take time for it to realize the phone is not connected to wifi anymore), or a ping sensor (although a sleeping phone might not be pingable), the private ble integration, a bluetooth beacon or something similar.
The private ble integration is your best bet, though some brands stop transmitting while asleep:
If it does not work, you can set up your phone to be a bluetooth beacon. But that increases battery use.
I have Homekit on my phones and Homekit bridge so HA can see things like my Homepod and other Homekit devices. Since Homeklit knows where my phone is at all times would it be possible to have Homekit tell HA that I'm not home? If so, any suggestions for how to set that up?
I don't use Apple products for location, but I think I read somewhere that this might do wht you want, because it pulls your location from Apple cloud:
Thanks. Tying Homekit back to HA opens up possibilities that Homekit alone can't solve, like making automations that run only with all people get a certain distance from the house instead of just one person leaving the house.