my wife and i both have the same phone basically (slight difference, i have the s20+ while she has the regular s20). we’ve got the settings all set up the same way on both phones (they’re all identical for both the app and the phone settings itself, data saver / location / etc, that was the first thing i checked).
yet her phone seems to be updating a good 5-10 minutes before mine every time if we’re out together. example: we went to the local park for a run tonight…when we got home, her phone updated that we were home at 10:01pm. mine didn’t update as home until 10:11pm. even though we both walked through the door at the same time.
i even tried turning high accuracy updates on for the home zone…that didn’t work either (obviously). at least, it didn’t work on my phone.
what could be causing this? i have been pulling my hair out all night and i’m out of ideas…
first start with the steps, then if hte issue continues move on to the logs that are still part of the same troubleshooting step:
Join the club, there are many MANY discussion on this topic, none seem to lead to a stable setup, I have the situation of two identical (bought same time) phones, same network provider …and sometimes they differ hundreds of meters… I suggest to close this and check other threads to not start the same set of discussions again.
1 Like
If you continue to see issues after following the steps in the link above then the correct approach is to file an issue on github with the logs from the troubleshooting step.
1 Like
i had already done all the troubleshooting steps - they at least got me from not having it report at all to at least updating the trackers now…just that now the issue is they’re not updating anywhere close to accurately enough to use them in any sort of automation.
i’ll check the logs out when i get home in a few minutes here and see what they look like.
yea not having location permissions all the time is a big one 
you should be seeing updates every 1-4 minutes
check and see if any reports are being skipped for accuracy, you will see updates being skipped if location has not changed in 15 minutes and other things.
After checking the logs and adjusting accuracy if you still require anything faster than that then consider looking into using high accuracy mode
it seems like from looking at the logs, my issue may be network related rather than location related. the app seems to be trying to get a location but the network bombs out (service is kinda spotty around my house, but lately it has been strong enough to keep music streaming going so i wasn’t thinking this would cause issues).
i’m going to attempt to fix this by creating a node red geofence automation that runs every 60 seconds and checks the last known location, and if it’s on my route home right nearby the house it runs the automations i need to run (specifically unlocking my garage door). are there any other things i should check to make this more efficient?
@dshokouhi i have the zone based expanded home thing set up, and it’s not working. at all.
i have my home zone set up at 200m, and the expanded zone in the app set up at 3200m to try to turn high accuracy mode on when i’m entering my home zone…and it didn’t turn high accuracy mode on. at all.
just based on my geocoded location history, the app isn’t even coming close to reporting anything correctly. we left a restaurant at around 10:30 tonight and it had us still there close to 11:10pm, then one quick blip around 11:10 nearby our house and then shortly thereafter at home…but completely missing my geofence on the way home, which it should have easily hit. i set up the geofence that it should get a GPS lock somewhere inside that fence any time i’m on my way home, within about 5-10 mins of getting home. this just isn’t even coming close to working.
Your should look at the logs to see if any event is skipped. You had already mentioned that some events were skipped due to network failures. How do you know that was not the case then? A lot of users use high accuracy mode and don’t have this issue. We print a lot of data in the logs so those are the best place to begin with troubleshooting. If you use zone expanded then high accuracy mode only turns on when you enter the expanded zone. Again the logs will show this happening. The companion docs cover in detail how the various high accuracy mode settings work too.
I will check, but I intentionally made the expanded home zone super large because I wanted it to encompass areas on my route that I know have service. that shouldn’t have been the issue here…the spot nearby my home along the route that has no service (that was causing the network failure) is a very specific spot. there should have been plenty of room for the app to pick up where I was and turn high accuracy mode on, but it didn’t. I have the high accuracy sensor enabled and it stayed false the entire time (including when I left home last night, for that matter).
I’ll see what happens when I leave the house in a few minutes here and report back.
again it didn’t work. didn’t turn high accuracy mode on at all according to the sensor, neither when i left home nor when i was arriving back at home.
what am i looking for in the logs to see if it even tried?
Start with the zone events and see if those even get sent. If Google doesn’t detect a geofence change then the app won’t be aware either.
We also print everything in the logs too. The entire location decision making process. Including when we get updates from Google.
i’ve got a bunch of these lines:
07-23 12:59:31.622 4626 14820 D LocBroadcastReceiver: High accuracy mode disabled, because not in zone [zone.home_expanded]
looking at my geocoded location sensor, it seems it shows me at or right near home the entire time i was gone, which was about 30 minutes or so (even though the actual zones changed me from home, to “almost home” - which i have set up as my home zone with a much larger radius to match where high accuracy mode should turn on, to away, to the store i stopped at, then back to home again (interestingly it didn’t change to away or “almost home” on the return trip, just home).
You can see the location report coordinates just before that log line too. If this is all you see then you may want to adjust the zone radius to match what the app reports. We try to provide as much data as possible in the logs so users can make their own unique adjustments as they see fit. Most users are ok with the default settings but for others it may not work out.
i don’t see it finding coordinates anywhere near that line. i do see a few coordinate updates, but none anywhere near where it’s disabling high accuracy mode.
i’m not sure what you mean about adjusting the zone radius…my home zone is relatively small (200m), but as i said i made a huge “almost home” zone (3200m) to try to account for the limited service in that one spot right nearby my house. i have the high accuracy meters setting set to 3200 as well. however, even that doesn’t seem to work.
i’m not sure what to change at this point, although i guess i can’t really hurt anything since it doesn’t work as is - but i’d like to know why i’m changing things so i can make sure if i need to do it again in the future for some other location, i won’t have to bother you again with it. 
So at this point you need to look at the logs to see what you need to adjust. There is no straight answer as to what you need to change but the logs will indicate when we get updates and what happens to them. Once the app registers the zones as geofences its up to Google to notify the app that it has a location update from geofencing.
The first log line when we get a geofence update will be Received geofence update. from there you need to look at the coordinates and accuracy to decide if you need to update anything.
It would be easiest for you to first setup an automation that looks at the zone enter and exit events that I mentioned before so you can look at the actual data received and make decisions from there.
i guess i’m not following as to what i’m looking for here. i have the “almost home” zone set to the same thing the expanded_home should be, and there’s plenty of cell service throughout the zone except for that one spot nearby home that has no service, but it is NEVER picking me up coming home. it occasionally picks me up leaving home (i finally saw the high accuracy mode turn on when i left home earlier tonight), but literally never picks me up on the way back home.
edit: just looked at both mine and my wife’s geocoded location sensors on the way home tonight, and they’re only updating every 15-20 mins or so. tons of gaps where we are supposedly sitting in one spot, even though we were on the freeway on the way home…i really want this to work, but i’m flying completely blind here. i have no idea what i’m supposed to change, and i’m not at all following what i should be looking for to try to figure that out.
I have mentioned several times now that you need to look at the zone events and logs, in neither of your responses have you provided any of that data except for explaining how things are not working and over again. If you want help you need to provide the data previously mentioned. I gave you all the tools you need, without the data that we provide nobody can help you.
because, as I said, I’m not following what you are telling me to look for. I don’t see any zone related log entries other than the ones I already posted about it not being inside the home expanded zone, so it was turning off HA mode.
I don’t understand what automation you want me to set up. I already have zone entering and leaving automations set up, but they were / are never being triggered. it’s as if the geofence somehow doesn’t exist (even though the app logs do show it at least being there, even if it’s never being used to turn on HA mode).
I’m happy to provide anything you need to help get this working, but I’m just not understanding what you’re telling me. my apologies for that disconnect, but I’m not sure how to resolve it.
I did not refer to Zone log entries, I actually said Zone Events. Events are a part of home assistant and you can listen to certain event types. For our app anytime a zone entry or exit is detected the app will send either android.zone_entered or android.zone_exited event. I gave this link up above, if you are unfamiliar with events I suggest you read up on Home Assistant events so you understand how that functionality works.
In order to continue helping you I’ll need to see the logs as the issue happens. Will need to see about 10 minutes of the logs. The zone events above should help out to understand when to look at the logs because the event fires as soon as we receive a geofence update from Google. You can mask the GPS coordinates in the logs but i recommend looking them up on a map to see if the mark is where you expect it to be.
1 Like