Device tracking........help please

ok Life360 is out, what can we use instead? need it to be accurate like Life360. Trying Owntracks and that real doesn’t work well at all. Is there anything that you guys are using? I use device location in my automation so I need it to work. Thanks

I don’t understand what you wanna track. Probably mobile phone. You can track local devices connected to wifi or any other protocol.
If you are tracing phone use companion app. Depending on you needs, you can track zones or you can set it up to track locations.

our cell phones. Thats what Life360 did and did it well. Is there a write up for the companion app on how to set it up for tracking cell phone devices, it doesn’t seam to work

You need a subscription to nabu casa cloud service. It is made by the guys that developed this.
Try it, it is free for a month if you don’t want it you dont have to pay for it. But then you will have to solve that kind of problems by yourself.

If you don’t want to pay there are free options like DuckDNS or Tailscale. Though subscribing to Nabu Casa does help support ongoing development of Home Assistant.

Yeah I know. I tried and used tailscale and it works, but nabu casa works better to be honest.

I had to use Tailscale while working at a site that blocked Nabu Casa. It worked well for me during that time. But Nabu Casa also has other advantages like text to speach engines and voice assistants.

Yeah it does. But you know annual subscription is around 70 €. If someone is not really low on money it’s a good deal. I spend more on beer annually. But the great thing on OSS is that you have a choice and you can always choose what is best for you.

I use Nabu Casa and now I’m trying the companion app. I had to change some setting and now going to test. Owntracks does not work good

I don’t think you need owntracks to track your phone using nabu casa. You just need to set up companion app.

Great. The position updates from the companion app are pretty good. Do make sure you read the documentation about getting the most from it by setting your phone permissions correctly. Particularly for Android phones if you have one: https://companion.home-assistant.io/docs/troubleshooting/faqs/#device-tracker-is-not-updating-in-android-app

I watched this youtube video.
Y206 d ub H1 T7 (youtube.com)
it is old but it helped me setup the companion app, I just tested it and it worked, not bad. Thanks everone for all the help.

If you’re looking for something that is probably already on all the phones you want to track, you might try the Google Maps integration. If you need any help getting it working, don’t hesitate to send me a private message. I’ve written a detailed set of instructions (which I hope to eventually put in the official docs), and I’m working on some major updates to the integration to make it easier to use and bring it up to date.

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Follow link below for information about a beta quality custom version of the Google Maps integration I created that solves a lot of the problems with the existing, built-in integration:

Device Tracker, Best echange for Life360 - Configuration - Home Assistant Community (home-assistant.io)

Please see the following new topic for more information & discussion concerning my custom version of the Google Maps integration: