Hi everyone,
I just purchased a HA Green and I’m in the early stages of setting it up.
I haven’t signed up for a HA Cloud account yet. But in the meantime, I’m pondering how mobile phone location works without an account. I’m guessing it really doesn’t?
So after coming home and logging into the home account, it will register the mobile device is at home. But absent that, HA won’t know where it is at all, correct?
If you use the companion app, mobile phone location is provided to HA without needing a cloud account.
Your sever only needs to reach the Internet from the inside of your network. If you don’t block outbound connections, push notifications will work independently of whether your server is reachable (inbound) from the Internet. Push notifications go via a third-party system that then pushes it to Apple. Apple then delivers the push notification to your device, if/when it’s reachable.
Thanks for the replies.
I am on an Android phone, and there are privacy options for location permissions for any app.
Do I need to give the HA app location permission for “always,” or will it still work okay if location permision is set to 'only when the app is running."
According to the Documentation, yes. Location | Home Assistant Companion Docs
Thanks all for the guidance.
So I constructed a couple of automations to test out the localization.
The first is a simple notification for when I/my cell phone enters the home zone.
The second is the opposite, a phone notification when I leave the home zone.
I manually triggered both to make sure the phone app shows the notification. It does.
However, I haven’t had it work as I think it would though. After leaving and/or coming home, there are no notifications.
Am I missing anything simple?
Is your HA server accessible over the Internet. If not, your phone cannot send an updated location. If you don’t want to expose it, you need to use other ways such as a network device tracker.
Ahh, I thought as much. Previously it was explained that the HA companion app would be able to accomplish this without HA Cloud. Maybe there was the assumption I had opened up my fledgling HA server to the internet in some other way via VPN. I have not yet.
I see how without remote cell phone<–>HA server access this is not possible.
EDIT: Activated the HA cloud trial and it started working as intended.
Is there a way for HA to detect the phine absence ?
If so this can be used to trigger actions. It will trigger the action when the phone is off too
Not using the app, no, but there are many other options, like nmap_tracker, or an integration for your router.
thanks will check those
Just checking this and wanted to confirm… so location updating for a persons location based on their phone won’t actually update unless you have the cloud subscriptions ?
No. The cloud subscription makes it so that mobile apps report their location through the Nabu Casa cloud, without the need to expose your HA instance to the internet (or to a VPN the phone is also connected to).
You can achieve what you need without the cloud subscription. The cloud subscription makes it very easy and reasonably secure.
No… It won’t update unless you have a way Fkr the phone to get to your HA install. A subscription is just the easiest most painless way.
Look up other ways to expose your install to the internet. If you don’t want the sub.
People get perrsnickity about the cost but if you don’t want to pay the you need to setup dynamic DNS an external DNS provider a secure reverse proxy, VPN tunnels etc. (you’re paying for convenience)
That’s disappointing.
It’s physics and IT security. I wouldn’t want it to be able to happen…someone somewhere has to carry the signal. If it happens without a marshaled connection. You have an issue. 
so configured tailscale… does my phone need to always be connected to tailscale VPN and it needs to be on for the background location to be sent over?
also do i need to change the IP of my home assistant server in the compaion app to the 100.x ip tailscale gives me ?
Tailscale devices have a hostname resolvable within your tailnet. Usually the hostname is enough (probably homeassistant).
I actually configure tailscale on homeassistant to route the subnet where my home assistant lives, so I can use the same name or IP whether I’m inside home or outside home with tailscale.
That being said, I still pay for HA cloud to support the development team, and that allows me to avoid managing Tailscale on my wife’s phone. I find it valuable even if I still keep the infrastructure to access home without it.
But since this topic is about doing things without, Tailscale is a good solution.
If you want to do proper location tracking and record every location change, then yes. If you only want to know whether you’re home or not, then you don’t even need tailscale.
There is another way.
You can use Googles position, that does not require a connection between the phone and HA.
The positions are saved on Google and HA polls it from Google.
This means you get a few updates per day, you can’t really do any meaningful automations with the position.
