iCloud v3 / Home Assistant Companion App / Life360

Configuration
1

With the ending of Life360 support I’ve decided to try and replicate the functionality as best as possible using the companion app, icloud3 and node-red. The first challenge is that of location. The reason I think many were using Life360 was because it seemed to be the most accurate and up to date on location. The companion app appears to not be reliant and icloud3 as far as I can tell relies on the companion apps detection of leaving zones. So I am trying to bridge this gap.

Questions I have for the community.

  1. Has anyone actually started down this road, if so what have you found and what challenges do you have?

  2. Has anyone played with the beacon requests in icloud3?

  3. Does anyone know what Life360’s beacon requests were because it didn’t seem to drain the battery any more than anything else.

  4. Is there any way to control HAMA (Home Assistant Mobile App) to update more frequently?

Thank you in advance for any insight anyone can lend.

2

I replaced Life360 with iCloud3 v3 recently and I’m pretty please with the result. Potential issue with integration relying on HA Companion to trigger change of location probing frequency might be resolved by setting parameters. But I found it to be OK for ~30 minutes inside the zone and 1 minute outside zone.

3

From my understanding in the docs, that’s how iC3 actually behaves already but I could be wrong.

Do you care to share your timing variables for iC3 or are you using the defaults?

The main challenge I have observed is when someone leaves a zone, Life360 knows immediately. iC3 can take up to 30 minutes or more to notify.

4

Here are my settings for integration and for devices:

Screenshot 2024-01-29 at 19.22.30
Screenshot 2024-01-29 at 19.22.30577×1298 96.5 KB

Screenshot 2024-01-29 at 19.23.18
Screenshot 2024-01-29 at 19.23.18574×1206 91.6 KB

Well, if there is HA companion App installed and configured in iCloud3 v3, than, as I understand, companion app notifies integration about leaving the zone and from there integration tracking takes over. It seems to work, as I did not noticed significant delay between leaving the zone and updating position of device tracker in integration. So knowing that HA Companion App is somehow slow it indeed can be worse than Life360, but not as slow as it is defined in INZONE INTERVAL.

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