Hi Developing Team,
I have some questions for you.
How does geofence work? I mean, every time I leave a zone, HA companion informs Home Assistant almost immediately or every time I enter a zone. On the other side, when I leave the home zone and I don’t enter any other zone, my location is never been updated automatically.
I activated the location notifications and I observed that during my presence in my home zone, I got many notifications, in contrast to when I am not in any zone.
Is the location being update more frequently when in Zone?
Why entering a zone is so quick understood?
When not in any zone, even “significant location changes” are not being sent to HA. I mean they do not trigger at all. Not “Background fetch”, neither “push notification request” (I know this could be because the 5 sec limitation). But this creates a big problem to proximity automation in general. I am more than 7 hours 6 km away from home zone, and the HA map shows me that I am exactly outside the Home Zone. (100m radius).
Hm, I had these problems before but with older versions of the app.
Question 1: What version of HA are you using?
Question 2: What version of the app are you running (e.g. 1.5.1 or 2.0)?
Question 3: Did it work before?
To do 1: Remove the app entirely.
To do 2: Restart your iphone.
To do 3: Reinstall the app (pref. version 2.0)
To do 4: Go through the onboarding process and make sure you select ALWAYS on everything it asks you to (or at least the location ones). Make sure the categories you want to allow are set to allowed (3 in total) before you click finish.
To do 5: Create a person entity if you haven’t already. (At configuration>person)
To do 6: Add the newly created device_tracker to that person entity.
To do 7: Restart HA (DO NOT FORGET THIS)
To do 8: From now on use the person.[[yourname]] as your device_tracker (if you do not do so already).
If all is correct it should work, however, you will have to make sure your app can reach HA outside of your network. If this is not the case than you will have to do that first as the app can not send gps locations to a non-reachable install.
Do you believe, that the App is the problem or my iPhone doesn’t trigger GPS coordinates? Is there any way to check that out?
As for your last recommendation, the App can reach HA. I can manually update my coordinates without a problem and also almost instantly. ( I mean there is not time until coordinates are calculated, so I suppose the iPhone know my whereabouts.)
No your iphone uses geofencing (not sure how it works but I think it is similar to predicting processes in processor technology) this saves energy as it doesn’t poll an exact location every minute. There is also an icloud component which does device tracking as well. This is far more accurate, but very very demanding on your battery. Anyways, I know 2.0 is not in the app store (yet). Though I’d still advise you to get it even though it is still in beta. (To my knowledge the current version is likely the same as the release version).
1.5.1 hasn’t been updated in a while and 2.0 is far superior to that, get the app here:
Try with this and follow the steps I put down earlier and report your experience afterwards.