I currently use the Life360 integration to manage my home alarm system in HA. Like alot of others, it stopped working this month. It has also been a little flakey over the last few months - reporting my phone as being away from home for 15-20 minute periods for no apparent reason.
I was wondering if anyone could recommend a good replacement solution, which can be installed on mine and my wife’s Android phones.
I’ve had a quick look at Owntracks, but have no idea how reliable it is.
???
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I don’t know… never tested.
I have used life360 until yesterday… but after the last issue and the difficulties due to non public API I have decided to quit with life360.
Owntracks require that your home assistant instance is reacheable from internet (using Nabu casa, VPN like tailscale, etc… ) and it could be an alternative to companion app if you want to check the presence of your friend.
Using “a free” solution such as companion app and tailscale I have noticed that the battery consumption on mobile devices was increased.
I am not interested in “friend position” since I want use the presence just of my family members to toggle some automations (such as home alarm activation) and since my family members are all on Apple iCloud I have installed the supported iColud integration, modified my family group and finally disabled life360 integration.
On on of the github issues I came across for this issue, the maintainer of the life360 integration suggested using the Google Maps Integration, which I’m about to install myself. Then you can track Android and iOS family members (although I find all my iOS family members keep on blocking ‘Always Allow’ when their phone asks if the App should still be allowed to track their location, grr).
EDIT: Having major issues with the Google Maps Integration, the cookie only log you in for a short time (see this github issue I made here. Hopefully someone will fix it.
My Life360 is broken too. Currently i try this (on myself as POC):
- Owntracks - works fine, i think it is “better GpsLogger”
- HA android app - works fine
I reccomend “integrate” more trackers into one “person”. Now i have one wifi Unifi tracker and three GPS trackers in my person entity (unifi, life360, HA app, owntracks). This solution is error-proof if one of trackers is down.
Some notes:
-
I need integrate location into two HA instances. Owntracks is fine, HA app too (you have to define more servers)
-
HA app is NOT good solution for family (children) i think it is dangerous to give him full access to HA (entities, cameras, …).
I only need to know if people are home or away rather that tracked outside the house so I have moved to using the ASUSWRT integration that reads data from my ASUS router and can create device trackers for any WIFI device. So presence is now based on if family members phones are connected to WiFi or not.
I need precise location because i have automations “turn on heat 10 minutes before arriving home” based on google travel time.
My actual finding: OwnTrack is NOT suitable for me, becase it is not possible connect it to two HA servers at once. 
I’m just starting to look at OwnTrack, so this may be off “track”. But if you setup Onwntrack to report data to MQTT, can multiple HA servers access that data from the MQTT server independently?
I just started using Owntracks, it seems pretty good, although there appears to be an ongoing issue with it losing the last known location of a device, when Home Assistant restarts. This persists until the device reports a new location in Owntracks.
Hmmm…it looks like Owntracks won’t be of any use to me. I installed it a couple of days ago and just got this notification on my phone:
“This version of Android restricts OwnTracks from receiving locations when started in the background until the app is opened. Click this notification to open the app and start tracking location”
(I’m running Android v14 on a Galaxy A54 5G)
So it looks like the HA app may be the next best choice?
I primarily use location tracking to turn on the house alarm when my wife and I are away from home, and turn it off again when we’re both at home. As a matter of interest what are other people using to trigger this sort of action? For example:
(a) creating a Home zone, and checking when the zone is greater than zero?
(b) creating a group, consisting of 2 people, then checking for group = home/away
I’m not sure what the most reliable approach would be.
I am still testing HA app and Owntracks. I will sum my opinion for now:
- HA app more reliable
- HA app can post to more HA servers easily
- HA app tracker entity has no problem after restart of HA - this is probably bug of Owntracks integration.
I will investigate more but HA app seems to be the best/only solution.
I can probably assist you with this. This is what I use for my HA setup.
(a) Create a “Home” Zone in your configuration.yaml:
zone:
# This will override the default home zone
- name: Home
latitude: [latitude coordinates]
longitude: [longitude coordinates]
radius: 200 //adjust accordingly
icon: mdi:account-multiple
(b) Create a Group in groups.yaml:
whoishome:
name: Who is Home
entities:
- device_tracker.[device_1]
- device_tracker.[device_2]
- device_tracker.[device_3]
(c) And, in your automation, you can use the trigger:
trigger:
- platform: state
entity_id:
- group.whoishome
to: home
-or-
trigger:
- platform: state
entity_id:
- group.whoishome
from: home
I also noticed that when I tested OwnTracks last night. I quickly uninstalled it as I need a client to run transparently on mixed devices (Android and iOS). I have settled with the Companion App for now and have gotten the app running on our devices (2 Android and 2 iOS).
However, I do agree with @bigboban as it provides access to all users that have the app installed. It would be nice to be able to lock down permissions/privileges in the Companion App.
Thanks for this. I was thinking I could use person entities in the group, instead of device tracker entities? I could then track each person using both router presence detection and GPS from the HA app?
Would that make sense?
EDIT: I tried to submit an example of what I mean, but got a pop-up giving me 2 options - (a) fix code or (b) post anyway. Clicking on either button had no effect, so I had to remove all words which could have been construed as code. This has happened several times today, on 3 different browsers and 2 different (Windows 10) machines.
Has anyone got any idea why this might be happening?
I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. You can try this instead in your groups.yaml file:
whoishome:
name: Who is Home
entities:
- person.[fname1_lname1]
- person.[fname2_lname2]
- person.[fname3_lname3]
EDIT:
I changed my personal entry from device_tracker.[device_name] to person.fname_lname and it worked… It still reported my location.
COMMENT:
You have to use the [Preformatted text] button in the WYSIWYG with code excerpts so it can display it properly in the post.
Forgot to say, I also use iCloud3 v3 from HACS. This works quite well, but is iOS only, and unfortunately the Friends and Family doesn’t work anymore (something they do tell you in the instruction, but halfway through the installation).
I’ve always used similar logic and applied it through a custom entity rather than the person entity for a bit more control.
2 WiFi trackers. Companion App WiFi Sensor and Ping. (I find my UDM Pro often gets marked as unavailable in HA).
If WiFi is connected on the home network, then automatically mark as home. If WiFi disconnects, then check GPS location trackers. I’ve used Google Maps, Life360 and Companion App. I require a majority decision (2/3) from the GPS trackers to determine if I’m home/away. It’s been 99.9% accurate.
Now that Life360 is down, my entire presence logic is broken. I’ve played with OwnTracks 3 or 4 times over the years and every time I’ve had issues where it stops running in the background despite of battery optimization settings and requires the app the be opened to get tracking working again. That’s just not reliable enough for me.
I find the iCloud integration slow to update, ie. takes minutes between updates. I’ve also gotten apple “login attempt” emails throughout the night every few hours which is a bit… annoying and removes the layer of security in those notifications of possible illegal login attempts.
I think I will need to install the HA Companion app on all my children’s iPhones… The one on Android for me and my wife works great.
FWIW, I created a custom “composite” integration (long before the person integration existed) that many have had success using, including myself. And I just started working on a major upgrade (mostly adding UI config flow.) You might want to check it out. And, as always, I’m open to suggestions for improvement.
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Friends and Family seem to be working quite well with v3-rc9