Hi,
I recently moved to a new house. In home assistant I moved my Home zone to the new location. Ever since HA has a hard time detecting all of my house members devices (using HA companion app)
A bit of help and advice is needed.
Regards,
Arjan
Did your wifi SSID change or stay the same? If it changed, set the new one in the companion app.
Did you move your wifi with you? Apple and Google keep databases of wifi hotspots to improve GPS accuracy. It takes them time to realize the wifi hotspot changed locations. Even more so if you did not move very far away.
2 Likes
Yes,
I turned off my router in the old home and switched in on in the new home. SSID is the same. Everything works, just updating my location and the location of my family devices is not updating.
We are at home but according to Open Street maps we are in de surroundings of our old home. ot even IN our old home but nearby.
Yep, that would be the wifi databases. If you are inside, GPS is bad or impossible, so they think: you are connected to the wifi at your old home. Turn off accurate GPS features (counterintuitive) and/or wait till they catch on, which will probably happen sooner if you keep accurate gps features on.
By moving your Home zone I assume you mean edited the HA location in settings, not create a zone named Home, which you should not do?
1 Like
I also vaguely recall having to input new latitude and longitude in respect of my home location when moving home within the same suburb.
My router does not have an inbuilt GPS. I suspect most donāt.
WiFi databases? Stored where?
On their servers.
Yes, I moved the existing Home zone to the new location
Either your iPhone sends detected wifi hotspot information to Apple, or your Android to Google if you enabled the phone setting to increase GPS accuracy. They use it to build a database of hotspots with their location when you have an accurate GPS location. When you donāt, they use the stored location of the wifi hotspots around you to determine your location. So this is your phone doing this using cloud services from Apple or Google. Home Assistant just uses what GPS coordinates the phone reports.
Home Assistant just uses what GPS coordinates the phone reports.
This is what I noticed. My location is off in Google Maps as well. So it might not be a HA issue but something else
Make sure the HA companion app knows what your home wifi is in the connection settings. It may help with Home Assistant setting home based on you being connected to your wifi. If your router has an integration to create device trackers based on being connected to wifi, add that device tracker to your person in Home assistant too. Or create a ping sensor to ping your phone and add that device tracker to your person in Home Assistant. That way Home Assistant can detect you home even if your GPS might disagree.
For the ping sensor to work, you must set your router to always use the same IP address for your phone.
Personally I use this to have multiple sources of location for the same person to improve accuracy, it works somewhat better than adding multiple device trackers to your person in HA:
Thanks Edwin. For detecting who is home your suggestion will work. However, I also have zones for school, work etc, which need GPS location.
As long as you are not connected to, or near your home wifi there, there is no reason why GPS would not work there. Iām not suggesting to change anything to GPS, just to add extra means to detect home and fix that. Add more trackers, not less.
Surely the first time your phone realises the GPS data is invalid, it will clear the cache and rebuild it?
Not sure if there is any direct connection between GPS data derived from satellite readings and WiFi hotspot location data. BlueTooth maybe, but WiFi? If there is, the assumptions are invalid in this scenario, and should remedy themselves the first time the phone OS realises they are not valid.
In any case, the companion app, extracting GPS coordinates from the satellite data, and not from WiFi hotspot data should always be accurate if the satellite is visible. If not, folks, we have a problem, and digging into source code may be needed.
This has been a thingā¦ Kind of ever since smartphones became a thing. Hereās the first link that came up when I googled it:
1 Like
On the superficial basis of that sweeping statement from your first results in Google search (Iāve learnt by sad experience it is not always the best to click on, and that they may be generated by AI on the fly using unreliable resources), I stand corrected and not sure how you would flush the caches to remedy this issue. From what I can see, reconfiguring your WiFi hotspot SSID with the -nomap option will change it for you, but wonāt update the initial cached database. This is out of your direct control - it shouldnāt be.
This is ugly, making invalid assumptions that WiFi locations are fixed. In real life (as documented here in the initial post, and many other threads) they are not.
The end result is HomeAssistant Companion shouldnāt use the underlying mobile operating system location services for accurate location position, right? It should specifically access the actual GPS Data directly if it is available. Does it?
Conclusion: Entirely unsatisfactory. Surely this is bad? Puzzled and annoyed, I dug deeper.
Update:
On further reading of the official HomeAssistant documentation, and the two developer links provided there to actual IOS and Android developer documentation, it would seem the situation is a lot more complex than it appears. The 68th percentile confidence level mentioned as one option in the Google docs isnāt mentioned at all in the Apple documentation. The HomeAssistant docs mention their frustration at the lack of detail in Appleās documentation, and my observation appears to confirm most people experiencing location services difficulties are of the Apple ecosphere.
The three source documents below:
Android:
https://developer.android.com/reference/android/location/Location
IOS:
HomeAssistant:
My reconsidered conclusion. It appears that close attention to configuring location services in the Companion app, balancing that with phone battery life may be the solution to the perennial complaints of the āHome location service sensorā operating unreliably, Google WiFi location services functionality notwithstanding.
The issue has been previously identified and addressed to the best of the ability of the HomeAssistant Companion app developers given the scant location resources they have available. If you want/need reliable location detection, relying on just the default settings on your phone probably wonāt cut it for you, consistently. You may have to use added services to provide reliable detection.
If you want GPS only data, turn off the improved GPS accuracy features of your phone. Then you get exactly that: GPS only, which will result in inaccurate data in urban areas due to (amongst others) building reflections and often no data at all when you are inside.
You have likely used the improved accuracy for over ten years and never experienced any problems from it. Most people never do. My encounter with the downsides was about 8 years ago and it fixed itself over time.
Opting out of being in the database most likely wonāt help. It decreases your own accuracy at home once the location is fixed and it will probably get honored at the same time they would update your wifi location to fix it.
About every wifi hotspot in the western world is in those databases. they are huge databases, they need time to heal. Normal use is to query the database when you donāt know your location, so getting statistically relevant information where a wifi hotspot really is takes time.
Going a bit off topic, feel free to flag if itās not acceptableā¦ (Iām new here)
FYI I understand that you can opt out of Googleās spying on your WiFi location by adding ā_nomapā to the WiFi SSID. Iāve no idea if it works and I believe itās only Google it is supposed to work with. I think thereās something similar for Apple, but not the same of course 
AFAIK this spying has been going on since they began mapping for Google Street View. They were at some point found to have been breaking European privacy laws with that, but I donāt recall the outcomes. (This could be considered personal data which under EU/UK law requires opt in consent, but regulators havenāt done their job.)
They do that constantly, and only change something when they get fined. The _nomap was indeed added when they were caught braking our privacy laws. In reaction they created an opt-out, which is also not allowed but they let that slide. And Apple and Google keep as silent as possible, so no one knows they should consider opting out. or do they state if they actively delete all data associated with what they already recorded before you opted out.
Google locations repeatedly guesses correctly what companies I visit when inside a building that houses many other companies too. They will likely not erase my location history if those companies opt out.
1 Like