Relatively new to home assistant, have had it up and running for a few weeks now. The first few weeks went well with no issues in device tracking for my iPhone, however the past 3 days or so, the geocoded location has been teleporting my location to a specific address over 800 miles away. There’s never a variation in the address, it’s always the same one. It seems to happen randomly, and I haven’t been able to find a cause for it. It’s weird, because it’s not a small random spike and return, it will linger for as little as 15 minutes to as many as a few hours at that address. I am working from home at the moment, so even not leaving my house, the location still jumps to that address 800 miles away.
I have precise location on, with location access always enabled, background refresh enabled, and the updates set to 5 minutes. No other devices have the HA app installed on it assigned under me, besides my ipad, but the ipad location has been spot on the entire time.
The geocoded location will go to that address, and then the device tracker will say I was detected as away. I have reviewed privacy settings for iCloud and such, and there are no other devices or concerns that someone else is logged into my account.
Precise location is almost a best-effort functionality for the HA Companion app in iOS. What I see other users do is install a dedicated location tracking app like Life 360 or PhoneTrack and integrate it with HA. Check the Companion docs > Location.
The sudden, large and sticky location variations that you see seem to be due to the phone acquiring a coarse location with respect to a cell tower. This happens sometimes even on Android, specially when the phone discovers a new cell tower and at times it can’t get an accurate location.
As an update, I installed Life360, which has successfully showed me as at home for the past 5 hours. Home assistant location continues to teleport me 800 miles away, so it seems as if it’s a HA app or other configuration issue.(?)
Life360 has been focusing exclusively on precise location tracking for more than 10 years, while HA just passes to you whatever the basic iOS API gives it. Most likely it’s a function of how savvy each app is at interpreting the sensor info it gets. Even Apple Maps gets tricked by the impossible travel updates.
That make sense. It just makes me wonder why my iPad has had no issues at all and reports the geocoded location perfectly. Makes me wonder if there’s something wrong with my phone.
It could be limited to the phone because it can talk to the cellular tower while the iPad only connects over WiFi. If your iPad has cellular data too, it probably has a more powerful GPS.
