Location tracker very slow to update

We all use Android phones in our family. And we’ve set it up with the location tracker in home assistant, so we can know where everyone is.

We’ve set up the extra permissions for the location and to update immediately. And I think I Ve set up each phone the same way however. One person’s phone always lags 5 to 10 minutes.

This causes a problem in our automations to check when everyone is home or not. If that person comes home, the alarm goes off because Their phone just refuses to update the location. We get the update about 5 to 10 minutes after they are home.

This happened even after we migrated from their old Samsung to new Samsung phone. So I’m thinking it must be something in one of the settings somewhere, but I’m not sure where to look.

For ‘home’, stationary trackers like router or BLE-based integrations take precedence over gps-based trackers on the phone itself. If you are having issues with a specific phone double check that it is set to prefer WiFI over Mobile data and consider turning on its BLE transmitter, if available.