When you use the built-in solution did you remember if you restart core “regulary”?
Because I have fixed the issue on logs (showing auth error) restarting the core.
Thanks.
Restarting the CORE defeats the purpose of having a stable system. The 3rd party does not require a scheduled restart hence why I am using that instead of the HA built in one.
Great to know. I will check the latest RC version. Thanks
This does not work for me as I have zones that I want to trigger on when a device enters (like a grocery store) so I know which garage door to open later when the car arrives and my frigate automation detects a car in the driveway.
I have a reverse proxy setup through cloudflare DNS running Traefik so I can access my HA instance from outside the LAN just fine and I think for my case the app is the best way to go.
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FWIW, here’s my thinking in light of the Life360 apocalypse:
- The ASUS router integration can generally determine who is home v. who is away. This doesn’t do anything for proximity sensing however. (Users are at the door before wifi recognizes them.)
- HA Companion works great for me but that’s not appropriate for the other users in my home and extended family. (Unlimited HA for everyone? Insanity.) Until HA allows user/group privileges, this can’t be a larger solution.
- OwnTracks sounds like it’s a no-go as users will never remember to restart it after rebooting a phone (or after letting its charge run out).
- I am exploring BLE sensors/beacons as a partial solution to accurately open and lock doors at the house. Fun with ESP32 may be in my future.
Looking forward to reading what great ideas develop.
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Yeah, I was a little surprised when I installed the HA companion app on my wife’s iPhone to act as a device tracker and found that she, while not being an Admin, still has access to my entire HA UI.
Maybe the solution is for the HA Companion app to have an additional “device tracking mode” feature added that lets you setup users in HA solely for device tracking, but no UI access.
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I have some first benchmark tests here. This morning i went from home to work. This is result, when state went to “work”:
- Life 360: DEAD
- HA app: 7:10:15
- Owntracks: 7:13:46
- GSP logger: 7:10:12
- Person entity with all trackers: 7:10:12
- Composite entity with all trackers: 7:10:15
I see this:
- GPS logger and HA app - almost same good result
- Owntracks - bad result, almost FOUR minutes delay, it is unusable to some actions like “turn on light when arriving”
- Person and composite - almost same good result
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Hi, i have same problem with Life360 , i need some alternative for presence detection for home alarm, i want to post my case and wait for perfect alternative.
- Life 360: DEAD
- HA app: Error with user/group privileges ,Not appropriate for the other users in my home
- Owntracks: A lot of delay time
- GSP logger: Only android, Not appropriate for the other users in my home
- Google map integration: Error only works for 20-30 mins
In short, i need to find another option, can someone post more alternatives to investigate?
Interesting that person & composite come up with different results (i.e., apparently person uses GPS logger as latest & composite uses HA app.) Can you share the attributes of the GPS logger entity (of course, redact the latitude & longitude values)?
Actually, can you also share the attributes of the HA app entity as well?
I’m in the process of making major updates to the composite integration and would love to make sure it can properly utilize both of those types of entities.
I am not sure this is what you want. I hope it is.
HA app:
GPS logger:
I would prefer something like this from the Developer tools → TEMPLATE page:
{{ states.device_tracker.HA_OBJECT_ID.attributes }}
{{ states.device_tracker.GPS_LOGGER_OBJECT_ID.attributes }}
Then copy and paste (as text, not a screen shot) the output from the grey box.
If not that, then from the Developer Tools → STATES page, click on one of the device trackers, copy & paste (as text) the State attributes (YAML) shown at the top, then do the same for the other tracker.
Either of those ways will give me a better view of the actual state data.
But, it does look like neither of those tracker types provide a “last seen” type attribute. 
That’s too bad. Without that, my composite tracker can only go by the last_updated field of the State object, which is not necessarily when the location attributes (latitude, longitude, gps_accuracy) actually changed (and often isn’t.)
I think same result as on pic:
HA:
{'source_type': <SourceType.GPS: 'gps'>, 'latitude': xx.008016, 'longitude': xx.4180146, 'gps_accuracy': 14, 'altitude': 279, 'course': 0, 'speed': 0, 'vertical_accuracy': 4, 'friendly_name': 'Samsung S22 ultra ha apka'}
GPS logger:
{'source_type': <SourceType.GPS: 'gps'>, 'battery_level': 100.0, 'latitude': zz.008016, 'longitude': zz.4180146, 'gps_accuracy': 14.840999603271484, 'speed': 0.0, 'direction': 0.0, 'altitude': 279.29998779296875, 'provider': 'fused', 'activity': '', 'friendly_name': 'Samsungs22gpslogger'}
Yep, figured it probably was, but thanks for taking the time!
fyi
iam using android 14 & 13
owntracks i cant seem to get it to work right on the android 13 phone i made sure owntrack notifications was on, but keep going unavailable. on the android 14 it works, but too mucsh of a lag
to update zones
gps logger - its only been a day, but seem to be on piont
I am testing out GPSLogger on a couple of android devices and agree with Jeff above, tracking seems to be spot on. Monitoring battery usage, see how it does over the next few days. I am also trying to figure out the right performance settings in the app. Right now I have set the distance filter to 40 meters, to limit the unnecessary messages through Nabu.
Next I need to find a solution for one of our phones which is an iPhone.
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Yes but it’s not super reliable. I did some test last week when the Life360 integration went down for the final time. The HA Companion app has a “last notification” sensor that can see it. The issues I ran into were the fact that the Life360 app’s notifications are delayed. They’re not always instant. Sometimes my wife can leave home and I won’t get the notification until she’s a mile or two down the road (even though the app showed she left at the time she left). The other issue is if you have automations setup for multiple people, you’re required to get place notifications for all of those people. So I looked into setting up a separate HA account on my Fire Tablet that just captured all of the place notifications for all family members, which would allow me to use Node-RED to filter and trigger whatever automation I needed. But the Life360 app on the tablet wouldn’t reliably send notifications (I got like 1 for every 5 I should’ve gotten).
So if you’re using it for keeping track of places people go, it could work. But the notification timing isn’t reliable or consistent enough to use as a device tracker. And at the same time, you can just use the HA companion app for the tracking stuff and add zones for all of your places. That’s the route I’m going down right now (and looking into Phil’s composite tracker).
I think GPS tracking and home/away tracking is very different problem. And home/away is much easier. You can use BT, wifi, ping trackers or some very different principle asi presence sensors.
And answer to your post - cach some “XX leaved home” message and use it to set home/away state is very bad idea. It will be very UNreliable.
With a very simple mod to the gpslogger component, and a couple items added to the custom URL “HTTP Body”, I was able to add last_seen and battery_charging attributes. I’ll consider submitting a PR.
Of course, given the way the GPSLogger integration and the corresponding Android app work, I’m not sure a last_seen attribute is very helpful. At best, I guess, it helps in more accurately comparing location “fixes” from multiple apps running on the same phone (such as Google Maps & GPSLogger) assuming, of course, they’re both using the same time reference, which I would think is a reasonable assumption. (Otherwise, one would be using the phone’s time reference, and the other would be using HA’s time reference, which might be significantly different if one or both don’t keep their clock up to date.)
So, I’ve only been using GPSLogger for less than a day, but so far it seems to work very well. The downside seems to be, at least based on my Android phone’s Battery settings page, since I recharged it overnight, GPSLogger is using 5.6%, whereas Life360 is only using 1.7%.
Note that I already had Life360 on my phone and it’s used for more than just supporting HA. On the contrary, GPSLogger is completely an extra battery burden. For myself, it’s yet to be seen if that extra battery draw is worth it. I’m still using Google Maps for HA (which, like Life360 is not an extra burden), and that might be enough.
I’m curious, though, how do people configure their GPSLogger app, I mean with regards to its performance settings? Currently, I have the following settings. (I’m trying to have it work at least as well as Life360 did.)
- Log GPS/GNSS locations: on
- Log network locations: on
- Log passive locations: off
- Logging interval: 10 s
- Keep GPS on between fixes: off
- Distance filter: 5 meters
- Accuracy filter: 30 meters
- Duration to match accuracy: 60 s
- Absolute time to GPS fix: 120 s
UPDATE:
Life360: 3.4%
GPSLogger: 10.7%
I wonder if increasing accuracy filter and/or shortening duration to match accuracy would reduce battery usage. Guess it’s time for me to start searching the forum for topics on GPSLogger battery usage! 
My current settings, which I am still thinking if I need to tweak:
- Log GPS/GNSS locations: on - SAME
- Log network locations: on - SAME
- Log passive locations: off - SAME
- Logging interval: 60 s - DIFF
- Keep GPS on between fixes: off - SAME
- Distance filter: 40 meters - DIFF
- Accuracy filter: 40 meters - DIFF
- Duration to match accuracy: 60 s - SAME
- Absolute time to GPS fix: 120 s - SAME