I have been using several ways to track precence and check if people are home or not. Bluetooth, Owntracks, Unifi and some other things. I wanted to clean up this now and update. What is the best way of tracking right now? I have a person group defined as home or not home. I have also tried only to use the app on our phones but it tells my it tracks via GPS and they are all home even if this is not the case. Should I use configuration-persons to add devices to a users and use this?
Im using 2 App on my Phone (Geofency and Locative). Works great for almost 2 years.
You get a radius option to leave the house or enter the house.
I’m using my router. it shows me if the device is in the network and that means the person is at home
I have used router and apps as well but each time someone get a new phone there are so many apps that need to be set up and many places to change in Home Assistant. I was hoping that the new app for Iphone and Android would make all other apps obsolete and that it was better to use only the app for GPS.
I’m using the person integration.
And if some one gets a new phone I only need to change the device mapping to the person.
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For me there’s no single best way. Instead I break the logic into two areas.
Home/Away
For home/away I use Bluetooth (with WiFi as a backup). Being a local (aka “static”) mechanism, and one that just requires the phone to be turned on, it works very reliably.
WiFi alone isn’t great, since when a modern mobile is in deep sleep it’ll turn off WiFi (to save battery).
GPS isn’t particularly useful since it may be 5, or 10, or more minutes before it updates, and has a potentially very large error radius. That means it make take a while to report you as home after you arrive home, already have marked you home while you’re still many hundreds of meters away, or even mark you as not_home when you’re at home.
Where
For where somebody is when away I use GPS - but that does mean you need remote access to HA (whether manually or using the cloud service). Without remote access you’ll see what you’ve seen - a device tracker that’s always home.
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Funny,
Geofency and Locative both work on GPS. At the moment when you move (walk, bike, drive, train, plane) it is very accurate. I have a radius around my house of 100m. When Geofency and/or Locative are inside this radius they send a signal to HA.
When we are at home the GPS won’t move so we stay inside the 100m radius.
When we leave and going outside the radius it takes max 1minute later Geofency and/or Locative sends signal that we are outside the radius.
It work perfect, better then all other possible options to manage presence detection.
Tried Bluetooth, but iPhone change many times their BT MAC address so I can’t trust that one.
Wifi saime, iPhone goes into sleep, so then its gone…
NMAP tried it as well, didn’t work.
Im trust GeoFency in combination with Locative for full 100% almost 2 years without 1 mistake that I went home without my lights on or what ever that based on presence… Alexa Always greets me/us 
I don’t have a problem with the iPhone changing the MAC, but I do use monitor and have paired my iPhone with the tracking hosts.
Let me check that one…
what is monitor?
can you point to the documentation?
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Ok, Suddenly it worked so I am using router and app now. With persons. For those of you who are using the app with GPS. Have you disabled GPS as it might drain battery or be an issue regarding privacy. You do not want to track all family members all the time.
Correctly configured GPS isn’t a meaningful drain. I have my own phone reporting every 5 minutes, and it doesn’t make a measurable difference to the battery life.
Tried this also. Problem is that the BT of RPi4 is not that strong to cover my apartment.
When our iPhones are to far away then Monitor think we are gone…
Thats why I’m using locative and geofence. They make use of a radius where GPS point as to be inside before they send we are gone…
The point of monitor is that you can have multiple nodes 
I have one at the front corner of the house, and one at the opposite corner at the back. Between them I get whole house coverage.
I need to say that my wifi tracking works perfect. I changed the settings, so that the iphone is only away if it was not seen in the network for more than 5 minutes. I have no problem with the deep sleep on my phones
I don’t use monitor myself, I use room assistant but it’s the same principle. As Tinkerer said, install multiple nodes. I have 6 nodes because I use it for room detection.
(off_topic) you live alone?
If I do this, my partner will set me out of the house… haha
He is done with all my automation stuff haha
There are some BT dongles that cover over 100-150m that will be a option.
But for now my solution works great without any issues for almost 2 years
With monitor, you can do more things… monitor when someone is actual in a room or not…
Initially there was some 
for this, but they’ve grown to rather appreciate things like lights that turn on automatically, and off later when no longer required.
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Hello all, I’ve encountered a very strange problem which i can’t seem to solve. In the person integration, I’ve added my photo and tracking info as for the rest of my family. After I updated the information, I can see my picture and the tracking information appearing but a lit later all disappears. When I delete the picture in the UI and update the picture remains. Any advise would be appreciated