last year I started to “degoogle” and that included going with e/os and not using googlemaps etc.
Of course I loaded the HomeAssistant app, and gave permissions to it for “real” location etc.
HA constantly shows me at “work” when i’m at home, and in very random locations over 100 miles from where I currently am.
I’m completely lost as to how HA shows my location randomly, sometimes where I am, but more often at my work location (i don’t have “work” set as an area), or many hundreds of miles away. and almost never at “home” when I am.
How do I get HA to show my location accurately WITHOUT google?
you get a ROM with proper Google play services as that is what the app uses. Support is really only there for play certified devices that behave as expected with the API.
What we call GPS on a phone is in actuality a combination of techniques to determine your location. GPS does not work inside. Without GPS, mobile phones can guess your location based on an estimate of distances to GSM masts. But that is wildly inaccurate, and worsened by bad reception inside homes too. So another way that Apple and Google use is wifi access points. Both maintain a database of wifi acceepoints and there location. So based on what wifi accesspoints are in range and relative strengths, they manage to get it right inside too.
When you miss out on those databases, you’re left with GPS, and maybe GSM. So it might simply guess you are near that GSM mast you connect to, which may be off by miles (if your OS has info on those things too). So this is a big part of why it is hard to do without Google or Apple.
Home assistant does provide some remedies though, because you can add some form of wifi tracking of your own. Either by looking at the wifi HA is connected to, or using device trackers based on BLE, network connectivity etc. to detect the important locations, such as your home.
I do not know e/OS, but it might be more open than Android, so you could maybe get the location on the device and then send it to HA.
HA have several ways to receive the info.