For a couple of years now I’ve used Life360. For the first year it was great, no issues. Then during the second year of using it my wife’s phone (an iPhone 6S) would ‘go dark’, as in, an update would become overdue. I’ve tried contacting Life360’s support but they are beyond useless. The worst kind of corporate IT support you can imagine. They will fob you off until you tire of life.
So, I’m looking for a replacement for that platform. I ideally want to avoid Google location sharing. I’ve got the icloud3 component installed but to be honest I’ve never really understood it, what it does and doesn’t do and why some people hate it.
I guess an alternative would be owntracks? At the time I installed life360, life360 was thought to have the edge over owntracks but I can’t remember why, now.
Certainly when it works, it’s amazingly good.
Not accurate at all, sadly*. But thank you - I appreciate your reply!
* I get the impression the iOS app location tracking function was tested for the American context? Where you're driving big distances between work and home. Here in Europe it seems to flounder where you might live, work and play all within a 2 mile radius of your house
I started using Owntracks for a couple of months ago. After testing it on my phone (Android) for a while, my wife installed the Owntracks client on her iPhone. Since then, presence detection has worked flawless for us. Just remember to set the GPS accuracy (100 m in my case) or otherwise discard the measurement. That improved presence detection reliability considerably.
Edit: I have never used other service for tracking, thus I can’t compare the reliability to Owntracks. Just that I’m very satisfied with Owntracks.
How do you find battery life with Owntracks?
I’m sure when I tried it before it killed the battery quite quickly. Perhaps I had the update setting to often?
When it’s functioning correctly, i.e. whether or not the app is properly ‘awake’ in the background on iOS it’s really good at updating HA with even small location updates. It’s always accurate (ie no false positives) and it doesn’t do a number on your battery. It’s great when it works, which is 98% of the time for my phone and 85% of the time for my wife’s phone!
If it only works 85% of the times, I would consider it useless. After setting the minimum required GPS accuracy I have not experienced any fail on my phone. My wife’s stupid iPhone does now and then stop Owntrack from running in the background, which is the only fail scenario I have experienced.
But I only use Owntrack for detecting if someone is home or not. What is your use case since neither Life360 nor Owntracks works for you?
