I use device tracking through the Home Assistant app on mine and my wife’s phones. Now we moved to another address and I changed the coordinates for home and added a new zone old home which now looks like the old home zone. These two locations are 30km away from each other.
The problem after moving
What happens is that both devices suddenly jump between the new home and old home locations. Now and then any device is at home or old home. I have a maps card showing the entities and they create straight lines between the two locations back and forth. This keeps triggering an automation to turn off all lights when both of us happen to be “not home” (disabled right now).
What I’ve tried
Force shutdown the HA application on the phones
Restarted the phones
Removed the associated WiFi networks with “home” in the app
Removed the “old home” zone
cleared app cache
changed home location in Google
Funny enough when removing old home the devices sometimes instead enter a zone that is just yards away from old home geographically. I’m ripping my hair out here trying to figure out what is wrong. Hopefully it is just something I did wrong with my configuration but I feel like this is related to application caches or something similar.
Edit:
As can be seen on these pictures we have not been outside of Hallsberg today but the position has been detected in Örebro 30km away back and forth creating these strange lines.
The longitude and latitude corresponds with the old home zone strangely enough when it reports that it is there. How can this be as the devices are not there? Why does this happen to both phones.
I’ve switched to using Google maps integration but it does the same thing. My conclusion is that it is the phones themselves actually thinking this is happening.
There is a setting in Android to use wi-fi for better position. When I saw it I immediately suspected this to be the cause as my home wi-fi used to be at my old home location (gps wise). Turning this feature of did not make it stop though so I am at a loss here. Also now that I have both Google maps and HA entities for both phones these are not in total sync. Understandable maybe but worth noticing. Although both jump they are not always at the same locations.
I have identified at least partially the source now. I tested turning wi-fi off on my cell but keep it on on my wife’s. My phone does no longer report itself at the old home; not on Google nor by the HA app.
Before trying to turn this off I have tried disabling “improved location” in Android with the use of wi-fi. It seems this did not work although it should have considering turning the wi-fi off altogether did the trick. I had also tried forgetting my home wi-fi and adding it a new.
Don’t really know what the next step would be, but turning wi-fi off is not an option of course.
Phone settings => Location => wifi and Bluetooth scanning.
And further down in Location there is Google location accuracy.
I think both of them use the wifi names to get a location based on the wifi name.
If you have moved and use the same wifi SSID then I assume you could make your phone confused in the begining.
Hi @Hellis81
Thank you for your ideas. I do have wifi automation set up. Although in our new home we do not have coverage everywhere. Also the phones at times go into power saving mode for a moment and dissapear from WiFi.
The “Wi-Fi scanning” you mention I’ve already tried, it is what I refered to when mentioning “improved location” earlier. This does not fix the problem strangely enough.
The last thing I attempted now was to create a new SSID but even then google seems to figure out I’m on the same AP. I’m guessing they use the BSSID (AP’s MAC address) to identify my network
I found this fix from Google. Followed it and created a new SSID to the same network. Moments after joining the new wi-fi SSID I’m reported back at my old address. I’m getting quite tired of this by now. :’(
Edit: I realized now, 2 seconds after posting this that the problem is not the wi-fi I’m connected to but that the old SSID is present and in range of my phone. I’m not too eager to change it and also not to move all my devices e.g. tons of ESP’s to the new network.
I recently moved also, but I didn’t have these issues.
Although, I replaced the router, but used the same SSID.
I believe, whatever is linking your SSID with the old location should update at some point.
So even if it sucks then I believe just keeping wifi on and just living with it for a while will fix it.
That is my guess at least.
How else could the SSID in the first place be linked to the old adress?
I guess you are right. It makes sense that they would update these things. Sucks for my automations though.
I would think Google maps this against BSSID and not SSID alone as there are many common names among wi-fi’s. So changing AP and keeping the same SSID may work.
Lots to do with the automations, entities, groups etc after a move anyways. Maybe I should focus on the rest for a bit and hope that this one gets resolved by itself as you say.
According to my experience, google seems to scan and gather near WiFi SSID and GPS location through Google services devices. This way they are providing an easy accurate location based on those two informations, this way GPS is less used and your battery consumption improved.
Even if your WiFi is turned off it can still scan neighborhood Wifi SSID.
You should be able to check and maybe toggle those settings into the location section by looking for something like “improve accuracy”.
