Have 4 iPhone users with HA app and location tracking had been working well until past week or so. I have various locations around town with designated names including my daughter’s friend’s house which is 3 blocks away. On the map, the circle around the friend’s house is tight and does not intersect with that of our house.
For some reason, HA keeps showing various/all members of the family as being at the daughter’s friend’s house during various times of the day even when we are all home and haven’t exited the house. I tried to force quit the app, manual refresh. The location fixes but then starts ‘wandering’ again.
Also and maybe related my automation to alert my phone when someone arrives home has not been working even when HA correctly sees someone’s location as switching from Away to Home.
Are you using any device trackers besides the app? If so, try making your person entries just the app’s tracker.
If not you can look at the location history in the app to try and diagnose the location update. Find the one which looks incorrect in App Configuration > Location > Location History – it will show you visually on a map what happened, and tapping share on the bottom will share a screenshot and also a debug file with more information. You can drop that here or join us in Discord in #ios_snd_mac
Thanks for the explanation in the upload, it was helpful.
This is though – the system’s actually telling the app you entered the other zone. “Geographic Region Entered” happens exclusively from entering a zone’s region. However, your incorrect zone is <100m which means we cover it with a few additional regions, which are the orange ones there. The app won’t consider you inside that zone unless you’re in all 3 of the orange ones at the same time.
It does look like the system’s triggering this based on a Wi-Fi-based location fix (that’s what 65.00m accuracy means) which makes me think one of a few things are happening:
You’ve moved a Wi-Fi device from the incorrect zone into your house, but iOS is still using cached information about where it can find it.
The Wi-Fi in the incorrect zone was recently upgraded to a very powerful antenna which is reaching into your house occasionally
These both seem unlikely to me, but it’s worth writing down since it could be. Short of these, I’m not sure what’s going on or why 2021.6 would have influenced it. Although it does include a few location bug fixes, they’re around ordering or multi-overlapping-zones, which I don’t think are happening here.
If this doesn’t get us to a solution, I may need to look at the raw logs around the time that something like this is happening. You can find this in the App Configuration > Debugging > Export Logs. You can attach 'em to the same Dropbox link as above and I can take a look.
So our home is still using the same Orbi mesh (RBK40) that have had for 4 years. It has actually been acting up a bit and was looking at upgrading to an Eero 6 Pro just today. I can tell you my Logi Homekit Doorbell has had a fair number of dropouts in the past 1-2 weeks as well so it may well be a wifi issue.
That being said, neither I, my wife or son have ever connected to the wifi at my daughter’s friend’s house so not sure why even a more powerful wifi device there AND a dropout at home would ‘pull us’ over to that location.
Debug logs sent.
Update: Also, I did try to delete the HA iOS app on my iPhone and reinstalled it when first noticed this behavior but it didn’t make a difference. Did not do that on the other three devices but did have each do manual location refreshes which offered temp fix.
Your home wouldn’t need to drop out for it to see the other Wi-Fi device and try to get a fix using it. It looks like it’s about 100-200m from your zone, which seems a bit far for it to reach.
It is possible iOS 14.6 has introduced some kind of regression around region monitoring here, when zones are nearby each other, but it’s really hard to see the app doing something wrong here. From the raw data:
This is the Wi-Fi based location (65.0m accuracy = Wi-Fi) which seems like it’s going to be related to why the OS thinks it’s entering that particular region.
One potential thing to try: increase the radius of the other zone to 100.0m (or larger) and see if this happens. It may (somewhat counter-intuitively) reduce the closeness of the zones, since a smaller zone needs the wrapping zones around it.
I am also experiencing this and its causing me headaches. We have a zone just down the road and HA keeps putting our devices into that zone rather than home. We dont use any other device tracker as normally the HA companion app is excellent.
Getting debug information like the above comments I wrote would be helpful to see what’s going on. One thing you can do to see if it’s the same issue is to look at the Location History in App Configuration > Location. If you see that it’s Geographic Region Entered for the update reason, it’s likely the same.
I’m still not sure what iOS 14.6 has done here, but it does seem like the app is being lied to strongly enough that it’s hard to think of a way to detect this is happening. Best the app can tell, it was told it entered that region and it polls GPS to see how accurate it is, and it does appear to be good.
I’m curious if your down-the-road zone is also <100m. If so, try adjusting it to be >=100m and see if the issue keeps happening. If so, it may be the small-zone-handling the app does may be confusing the system.