Companion app ssid awareness for location/zoning

I only have experience with the android companion app but this could apply to iOS as well if apple exposes the information.

The android app can use your home ssid to know which url to use to reach home assistant. I was thinking this information could also be useful for zoning. For home we have many ways of tracking that we are home, nmap, access-point association, etc. For other zones we only have GPS, which based on your phones hardware, os verison, and app settings (battery/gps access, etc) can result in delays when entering or leaving the zone. If you use zone associations to trigger an automation it can lead to undesired delays.

My proposal is to add associated ssid(s) as an identifier when you are in a zone. It could have a hold-down timer, or logic with it like device tracker+gps does to help with false positives, or even some bayesian logic if needed. To start I think simple 'associated to x ssid or not would be a good start. This moves non-home zone associations to more of an event driven state change than a timer based change that is dependent on gps.

Would love any other thoughts people have.

The iOS app used to allow access to the SSID, seems to be broken now as of 13.3. I’ve recently asked robbie if my assessment is right.

Randomly, this (the SSID sensor) started working again.

I’ve had some thoughts on the location tracking being so bad on the iOS app compared to Life360…when you do the onboarding, the highest location tracking you can initially grant permission for is just ‘when the app is open’ - maybe that’s at least part of the problem? I went into the iOS settings and there I could update that to 'always’ for the iOS companion…