Hello,
I am confused about under what circumstances the ios app will report an updated location. I know it is supposed to report on “significant location change”, but does it use geofences at all?
The reason I ask is that I have other apps (SmartThings, IFTTT, etc) that use geofences and they are very (not 100%, but enough so that it’s an exception rather than the rule) reliable in reporting when I cross the geofence boundaries I set.
However, the HA iOS app is very unreliable for me. I have the app installed on both my iphone X and my wife’s iphone SE (both running ios11). And in the month or so we’ve been using it, it misses us going away/home more often than it catches it. Things I see:
- We’re both at home, but it shows one of us away
- We both get in the car an leave and it only marks one of us away
- Someone comes home and an hour later, the location updates and our “welcome home” automations fire.
(opening the app and clicking the button to send an update of course immediately corrects)
I don’t think there’s been one day so far where it “got it right” for both of us.
Believe me, I get it that accurate presence is the holy grail for home automation, but my prior experience makes me think I must have something set incorrectly (or not at all).
I have our apps set to allow use of location “Always” in iOS, I have my home’s location set in my configuration.yaml file. I do not explicitly have a home zone defined (per my understanding, this should be done automatically with a 100m radius).
- Do I need to do something in my configuration.yaml file to set up a “home” geofence?
- Is the app supposed to be using geofences?
- Anything else?