Hi All,
I am having a nightmare with device tracking. I use an Android with Owntracks and that seems to update ok albeit not very quickly so I think I need to look into iBeacon’s maybe unless anyone can help?
My Mrs iPhone on the other hand doesn’t seem to want to update it constantly say’s she’s away when she’s not? I have tried Owntrack’s and now I’m using iCloud and both is doing the same.
Can anyone help and explain at all?
Many Thanks
Mike
Try this:
Cheer’s buddy, This is exactly what I have followed and still no joy. I shall re-watch again later though just in case I have missed something
I deleted all my other device trackers, kept owntracks.
Make sure you are using significant location changes.
Also - how did you call out your zones? I setup a Home Zone in OwnTracks which mirrors a Zone: Home setup in Configuration and it seemed to work. Found this in another tutorial. Can’t remember where.
What do you mean by this mate?
My zones are setup within my config file.
http://owntracks.org/booklet/features/location/
iOS
The iOS app offers 3 modes of location publication:
Quiet mode
Manual mode
Significant location change mode
Move mode
In addition to this, there’s also Region Monitoring (a.k.a. Geo Fence) and iBeacon Monitoring and iBeacon Ranging.
I changed my mode to significant location change mode. All other modes didn’t work well for me.
Significant location change mode
iOS defines a Significant location change as travelling a distance of at least 500 meters in 5 minutes. This mode allows the app to run in background and minimize the power consumption.
This standard tracking mode reports significant location changes only (>500m and at most once every 5 minutes). This is defined by Apple and is optimal with respect to battery usage.
Examples:
if you don’t move, no new location is published - even if you don’t move for hours. (Note, however, that the app will publish a ping-type message once in a while.)
if you move at least 500 meters, a new location will be published after 5 minutes
if you move 10 kilometers in 5 minutes, only one location will be published
I also changed the range to 350 on the owntracks app where i set the HomeZone (equivalent to HA).
I also expanded the radius of the home zone in HA.
Wicked cheers mate I shall make them changes and see how it goes 
I had no luck with Owntracks on iOS - I am using locative instead and it has been very solid something to think about if you can’t get Owntracks to work. If you do, let me know how!
Thanks for your input buddy I will take a look[quote=“aimc, post:8, topic:1935, full:true”]
I had no luck with Owntracks on iOS - I am using locative instead and it has been very solid something to think about if you can’t get Owntracks to work. If you do, let me know how!
[/quote]
Good luck. SigChanges is hard to test. Only when I actually leave and come home does it work. So it took a while to figure out but works nicely.
OwnTracks gives a notification that I left the home zone or entered home zone.
I’ve been using Owntracks but it never seems to get my home address correct, positioning me across the street half the time. So I bought a couple of cheap iBeacons and mounted one outside the house near the driveway. I then set that up in Owntracks and it’s pretty good at marking me home once I’m pulled in the driveway.
I did it because I wanted to have some arrival automations for turning on lights when it’s dark. And of course I never got around to it because of other cool HA stuff. 
But the combo works for me. But I would definitely look into Locative - if they made an Android client I’d move to it. I’ve heard a number of iOS users rave about it.
Don’t forget we have an iOS section in the forums and I’m sure you can get a lot of good feedback from there!
Oh yea - the iOS HA Beta app seems to work well but was redundant for me with Owntracks.
Also - I figured out where owntracks would place me and I made a block radius around this. As long as you are relatively close, all lights turn on with music.
My theory with Owntracks is that it is an interference between Owntracks fences and ha zones.
You make a fence in Owntracks and it forces it to register a location update. If the Owntracks fence is bigger than the ha fence you will end up just outside home and register as away. If you make it smaller, coming home will work but you will have the reverse problem when leaving, the update occurs while still inside the HA fence and you never leave.
I haven’t tested this in detail and have speculated that 2 fences might fix it, but I got fed up and reverted to locative which doesn’t report location but is pretty reliable for home/not home which it the main thing you need from presence.
Can you elaborate? My interest is piqued. 
The code attempts to handle zone updates and location updates together - but sounds like there is an issue. Love to fix if we can track it down.
If the Owntracks region has the same name as a HA zone then HA will use the GPS location of the zone when you enter the region.
HA blocks normal location updates between region enter / exit messages. So a location update just outside the HA zone won’t exit a zone.
If you only want the enter/leave messages to cause a device to enter a zone you can configure the zone as
‘Passive’. This will stop normal location updates entering the zone.
If you run ‘hass -v’ then the Owntracks code traces the messages it receives - which can help track down issues.
The mix of IOS location services / Owntracks/ HA is complex - but love to fix if we can track down the issue. Please raise an issue if you can get a clear case. I don’t spend much time in this forum.
I also started using beacons to force updates when I got home - my lights now turn on reliably!
Thanks for the reply @gregd - you have given me enough food for thought to maybe try this again - if I get it working I’ll let you know what I did differently and if I can find a clear issue I’ll raise an issue for you.
I wish I could use this, but as soon as I add an iBeacon to OwnTracks (Android), my battery life absolutely tanks.