I have a lot of automations that report the location of my kids as they pass through various zones. They rely on the HA mobile app. When various zones are entered, I play TTS on my Google speakers. All of this was working fine till I got my kids new phones.
In the below screenshot is our home location. The smallest circles here represent mine and the wife’s phones. A Galaxy Note 9 and Pixel 3. The circle around “Hi” is my son’s iPad. The HA Assistant App version on all 3 devices is about 6 months old. The larger circle is my daughter’s new iPhone 14 with the HA app installed from the App Store last week.
In this screenshot, is my son’s Galaxy A22 again running the latest HA Companion App from the Play Store.
In the above examples, you can see that the devices configured a while ago seem to be very sure of their location. However the two new phones aren’t very sure. My daughter’s iPhone is on the home Wi-Fi like the older 3 devices (just in case you’re going to tell me that wi-fi contributes to ascertaining location). In the middle of the night, her app reports an accuracy of 1 mile sometimes! Same issue with my son’s device, it jumps from 30 to 100m in the space of a few minutes. His older and inferior phone was always reporting an accuracy of within 10m. The HA companion app options for location are a bit of a mess IMHO and I do struggle to make sense of them all, however as of right now they are all consistent across all 5 devices. Yet, I cannot get the required accuracy from the two new devices.
Why am I blaming the app and not the device? We also use Live360 and it is spot on every time. Thus, I have a means of comparing.
Any ideas what I can look at, tweak or adjust to get this working accurately again? Many thanks