I am looking for a way to sense if an iPhone is at home or away…without running any application on the iPhone. I would like to detect whether the phone is connected to my home wireless network or not so I could check it’s state in an automation. There is an add on to do this, but my iPhone, for some unknown reason, randomly disconnects from the network For seconds to a couple of minutes just sitting at home. Has anyone found an add on or iPhone XR option/setting to be able to use lan connectivity as a state to check location?
I’m not sure how recommended this is, but I’m using the nmap tracker with these settings at home and it’s been working fine:
device_tracker:
- platform: nmap_tracker
hosts:
####
home_interval: 3 #minutes
consider_home: 300 #seconds
The problem is that some iOS devices will enter a deep sleep and disable wifi connections, so with the longer time to “consider_home” I don’t get random disconnects.
I believe there’s room for me to set lower numbers but it’s already enough for my use case.
It seems like a lot of folks have struggled with this issue, and I have been wondering if it’s getting worse with later iOSs as I have my consider_home set to 2 hours and still get dropouts at night. A little searching, though, reveals that some folks may have found a way around this issue, such as this guy in the OpenHAB forum who allegedly is able to use hping3 to wake the phone.
Personally I just switched from asuswrt to this custom component (installable through HACS) which uses an ARP scan. I’m not sure yet and don’t expect it to solve the WiFi disassociation issue but will report back if it does (possible I suppose as the phones do keep some form of communication open for push messages and so forth).
For anyone that cares, arpscan_tracker didn’t do anything at all, including put errors in the log. Maybe I missed something, but it’s back to asuswrt and the drawing board.
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