Looking for some advice in regards to iphone device tracker. Apple is making it more and more difficult to keep background location active. The latest iOS asks the user frequently if they want to keep the location permission active and because if this, older people usually press “while in use” and stop the background location sharing.
I have tons of automations that rely on if occupants are at home or not. I am looking for a reliable way to track this. I have tried/considered the following options:
HA app (restricted by apple).
iCloud integration. This updates very infrequently and when the door opens the alarm already triggers so not usefull.
i have considered the ping integration but after some reading i found out that it also have a ping interval of minimum 10 minutes.
I assume that this forum has a ton of iPhone users so please, how do you reliably say to home assistant “honey, i came home”???
Please note that i have already read many topics about this but they are prior to the changes on the iOS…
Thank you for your suggestion. I haven’t tried that as it appeared to me difficult to set up. I was looking for a tutorial on YouTube but i couldn’t find something that covers the installation.
Before i deep dive into it and since you have been testing it. What is the update frequency please? I have Alarmo that automatically arms when all device trackers are away from home and disarms when at least one device is comes home.
Also, can you use proximity on it’s device tracker? I use it to put my home on Vacation when we are more than 35 klm away from home for an hour and i use the “Vacation” mode as a condition to automations that shouldn’t run when we are either away or on vacation.
There is a simple solution that I have used for a couple of years now.
Create a binary_sensor (I named mine “HomeKit - Home”).
Expose that sensor to HomeKit (using the Homekit Bridge integration).
Create 2 automations in Homekit: One for when you arrive home and one when you leave. Set each one to toggle the input_boolean you created to on or off depending on location.
Use that input_boolean as a trigger in your automations.
This solution kinda bypasses the restrictions that Apple places on background location refreshes and other things. You can create as many input_booleans as you need for other locations (work, school, etc) and have them turn on and off via Homekit automations and locations. You can also use this for other family members as well by creating automations in their Home app that turn on/off their sensors.
We care about the safety of the elderly at home. Keeping track of their real-time location of them is the key to protecting them from unnecessary danger. I once found that Cell Phone Carrier (Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint) could help us locate the phone of our family members to get their location when we need it. But the steps to use them seem to be very complex. Here is an article that you may refer to.
Then I tried to turn to some third-party location services online, such as TrackMobi, which can track a cell phone through merely a phone number. I have visited its website and it seems a very qualified website that provides people with online location tracking service.
Just added this, and it seems the most promising of all the options I tried, the home assistant companion device tracking, which was way not reliable and iCloud integration, which also seemed unreliable. I want the system to basically arm the moment I’m off WiFi and disarm when I reconnect. I think arming will be slightly delayed, due to scanning interval, but disarm I think should be pretty instantaneous as I reconnect to network and that seemed to mostly be my experience on my minimal testing
That’s awesome, I ended up playing with it yesterday and adding 4 more. Really it’s the same two devices, just the different IP addresses based on which network it’s connected to.
With my router I can assign static IP addresses, but with my Extender it doesn’t have an option to do that. I’m not sure if or when my extender may change the IP address. But I was doing this more for testing.
I’m gonna do some research find an extender that can let me assign static IP and was thinking of adding one in garage, so that maybe my phone connects to it sooner and alarm is disarmed sooner. Sometimes, I’ll pull in garage, enter house and it’s 10-15 seconds before alarm disarms.
This may have some random disadvantage I am not familiar with but I just use each iOS device’s own geofencing/location service built into Apple’s default Home App to track home/away presence for each member of my family.
I just have an Automation inside the Home App that triggers when I get home then just have the action written as a shortcut to fire off a local POST request toggling a little Boolean helper I have set up to “ON” when I am home and a second automation that’s the exact same triggered when I “leave home” that sets my HA helper to “off” while I am away.
Have a “arrive home” and “leave home” automation setup for my wife and son running as well.
Been using this method for probably a good 5 years and never had a single issue with any of our statuses being out of sync from my hub.
Here’s an example of the shortcut format I use written to set a specific Boolean to “on” if you’re interested
I had the same hassle with an extender. If yours is like mine, it replaces the first 3 byes of phone’s MAC address with its own, so from router’s perspactive, 1 phone becomes 2 devices. So I set a static IP in my iphone for home Wi-Fi network (outside of normal DHCP IP range), and then assigned the same static IP & phone MAC in router config. The latter only for documentation reasons, so that when I look into my router, I’ll know, the IP is used by phone.
I’ve been using the IPhone Detect custom component for several months now, but recently not sure what’s happening my wife’s iPhone will constantly go not_home to home, so my system constantly arms and disarms over and over while home and she’s not disconnnecting from WiFi,.l the static IPs are set. I had even done a factory reset on router reset up and same issue. My phone never has this issue. It’s like hers goes in the deep sleep but its not getting pinged and so it shows not home.
@michaelkrtikos have you finally found a solution for Iphone tracking ?
2 of my childs passed from Android to Iphone, (Companion app installed), and I see the updates on the Iphones not frequent enough (even very rare compared to the Android).
So I was looking for an alternative to companion app on the Iphone.
Here below the updates of the Android vs the Iphone for my childs on the same location :
I will have a look … but I need the tracking of 2 Iphones (my childs) … is it going to work with one single integration as I assume it will ask for ONE credentials ?
I am not really sure… My wife has one account and 2 devices connected to this account. The integration brings entities for both devices but i have never tried to add another account. Maybe someone else can help more with this question!
