Been playing around with replacing Life360 with pure Home Assistant functionality, but got some complaints.
With Life360, you get very short update intervals, even without the remote user having to touch the Life360 app, but Home Assistant Companion App doesn’t seem to update more than every 5 minutes or so when the person is driving. I’m not looking for anything more than like every 45~90 seconds, and since the Life360 app can do this I’m not sure why the Home Assistant app can’t do this.
I’m guessing this is something that could be done with the new iOS developer brought on board, if so, I would like to enter a feature request for this.
Also, the location setting of the companion app are set to Always, Use Precise Location, so that’s not the issue.
I find that the companion app updates extremely quickly when a user moves to a new zone. Are you looking to monitor movement within the same zone? If so, then yes, it won’t update immediately (at least this is my experience of it. Others may correct me).
Enter/leave a zone is almost instant, what I’m looking for is when the user is not in a zone, i.e. Away and driving. It’s actually for my wife, and she really wants to pay for Life360 and I really don’t, since I’m already using the companion app to trigger automations when she enters or leaves the Home zone, and notifies when she enters/leaves the work zones, I figured I could use it for the tracking like Life360.
I keep falling back to Life360 because it’s the best example I have of an iOS app that can update location every few seconds even when it’s in the background, demonstrating it’s possible for the Home Assistant Companion App (or any app) to do the same. I suspect Waze and Google Maps do the same rapid update when in the background, but don’t know that for sure, just know that Life360 absolutely does that.
I am not bashing those that have developed the iOS companion app, and if I knew XCode I would happily throw my hat in and help, but alas I’m just an old C/C++/C# programmer that doesn’t have access to a Mac to learn iOS development. This is more of a “Hey, can we get this implemented as a new feature?” kind of post.
I’ve used Life360 & Google Maps w/ HA for years, both with iOS & Android phones. And some of the phones (of both type) had both apps connected to HA at the same time (through my custom composite integration.)
I found that Google Maps was just as good as Life360 in this regard. In fact, I specifically did some analysis, and I’d say that using both provided better overall results, because sometimes one would update more often, and sometimes the other would, or at the very least, their updates wouldn’t happen at exactly the same times, so they kind of filled in each other’s gaps.
Anyway, check out the following post. I include a graph of how often Google Maps updates (from an iOS phone in this case) as comparted to how fast the device is moving. Bottom line, it updates much more quickly when the phone is actually moving, which of course, is what you’d want.
I will look it over, but those were provided as examples that an iOS app can do rapid updates. As for Life360, they have closed their API and broke the integration, at least according to the author of the integration. I couldn’t get it to work since the integration wants a username and password, and Life360 only does phone number and SMS for the login, which don’t get me started on the asinine thinking behind that glaring security hole.
As for the iCoud integration, my understanding is its only zone change notification, not lat/long while driving, which is the big piece I’m needing.
That would be me. I wrote the Life360 integration. FWIW, the reason it no longer works is Life360 started actively blocking third party use of their API.
Yeah, that’s very annoying that they did that, but on one hand I can understand because their whole business model is based on the app. If they offered a small subscription for API access I bet folks would jump all over that.
I am trying out that iCloud3 integration, I notice though that the speed component of the device_tracker is gone, so that sucks.
The limitation on the update is the same though, so that’s not great.
You could try my composite custom integration. It’s useful even when using just one input entity (device_tracker, etc.) as its input. (That’s how I mostly use it.) Besides other advantages, it creates a speed sensor.
How it can create speed sensor, if no other source device tracker reports it properly? The only one I can think of is Activity Peace sensor in Mobile App, but this is based on steps recognition (walking/running), not GPS.
Assuming the GPS locations of the input entity or entities are good, it determines speed simply by calculating the distance between each set of reported points and dividing by the time between them.
OK, clever! My idea was that this component just integrates already existing inputs from input sources, selecting one that is most up to date. But clearly I was wrong! So definitelly I’ll give this a try, as I was missing this info
I wrote the Life360 integration. FWIW, the reason it no longer works is Life360 started actively blocking third party use of their API.