The only “nerdy” thing about it is the setting up of the Shortcut. That gets quite technical. But still falls within the native capabilities of HA and iOS without needing another app or hacks!
I’m currently testing IRL to see how it performs.
I struggled with the HA companion app location responsiveness, plus you need to keep it open in the background on iPhone I think
I hope it works out for you! For what it’s worth, after several years I actually stopped using my own solution. This is because the Private BLE integration (built-in) is incredibly responsive, and requires no internet. If you use iOS devices and have Bluetooth (or Bluetooth proxies) set up, it is incredibly fast and reliable.
I stopped using it after one or two false negatives. I lazily did not look into troubleshooting though, because I wanted to get away from internet-dependent sensors as much as possible.
I have a few Bluetooth proxies around my house – specifically GL.iNet GL-S10s. Once you have a few Bluetooth proxies (or even just Bluetooth on your HA server using a USB dongle), you can just use the Private BLE integration. For iOS devices you’ll need to figure out what your IRK is as described at that link. Once this is set up, it is rock solid in terms of detecting your iPhone (or iPad or Apple Watch etc).
This method doesn’t require the internet at all, so I appreciate its higher level of fault tolerance (and its immediate detection). Because of this, it’s all that I needed for presence sensing.
Ah I see, I am currently using an older version of the same concept, it uses Zero Pi W to search for bluetooth addresses and not searching for private ble so it’s not as reliable since iOS turns off the Bluetooth broadcasts … thanks for posting the links!