I have some automation setup to send TTS messages to Alexa when my child leaves school and it works great with iCloud3 however often the polling updates are once every 2 hours so sometimes my kids have been home for over an hour before suddenly getting the TTS message. I tried changing the polling interval down to 30 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes…etc which helped, but it felt that method was draining the battery significantly faster. So I set up a new non-admin user in HA and installed it on my kid’s device however I don’t want them to be able to control anything within HA and wanted to hide the default dashboard which lists everything.
I made a “Kids” dashboard that was pretty much blank and changed all others to “admin only” except the default wont let me modify it (Plz correct me if wrong) and then on the kids device set that as the primary dashboard and then hide all the other items like map, energy, logs…etc BUT if the kid is bored and starts clicking around in the app they may discover these items are simply hidden and then can re-enable them essentially giving them full access to really mess things up.
Is there another simple way to have the iOS on a childs device thus giving me all the sensors & geofence updates desired without allowing them to go into HA and start messing things up if they’re smart enough to unhide things?
Would the Icloud integration give you what you need? Then there is no Home Assistant app installed on their phone, but you would still get tracking. It doesn’t have all the other phone sensors though.
I started with that, but the tracking intervals were terrible and sometimes zone exit alerts were delayed 20-60 minutes. Then I went to iCloud3 which you can set as low as 30 seconds, but that seemed to be a battery drain. My understanding is the iOS app has triggers that send events to HA automatically providing more realtime updates. Plus the extra sensors like activity levels…etc is nice (but not needed)
I use Apple Home automations to do presence detection. I expose an input boolean via homekit, and I have an automation on the phone the turns on the boolean when I arrive home and off when I leave home. It’s been rock solid for years now. Might be an option for you if you’re only looking for boolean presence (you can set up multiple zones to notify arrival/departure from), rather than explicit location tracking.
You can un-toggle specific users from seeing the different individual views. I went in and un-toggled everything and that would severely limit what they could do/see.
There’s still some things in there they would have access to though, like logs and some user settings. I feel like I’m missing something here though, this should be something I’d imagine you would be able to hire from a non-admin user better.
