I was trying to get location presence running using the Home Assistant Companion app and allowed it Always access to my location data. Whilst this worked, my gut feeling over the couple of days that I had it running was that it resulted in a reasonable hit to my iPhone battery life. As I’m not particularly concerned with where I am, rather just if I’m at home or not, I wondered if I could instead use the built in Shortcuts app. In the Shortcuts app I created two Automations, one for arriving home and one for leaving home. In each case I only run a single Do action which is the Home Assistant “Send Location” action. For arriving, I send location as my home address, for leaving home I just used my work address.
I can see that each time I leave or arrive home, the appropriate Automation runs and I’m not noticing any battery impact from doing this. However, despite the Automations running, Home Assistant is not updating my location. If however I go into the Shortcuts app and run the Do actions directly, it shows me the address that it’s sending and I can then see in Home Assistant that my presence has update to home or away as expected.
What is other’s experience with the Companion app with regards to impacting the battery life of their iPhone?
Has anyone successfully used the Shortcuts/Automations actions provided by the Home Assistant app?
You can go into the phone settings and in the battery section see what apps are using battery. It shows how much time on screen as well as in the background. I have never had HA use more than maybe 30 minutes in the background over a 24 hour period. I have other apps that are much worse offenders. I can’t say I notice any impact on battery by just letting the HA app do its thing and Always update location in the background.
I did check out the battery meter and it didn’t have a lot against the HAC app but I’ve also seen that be incorrect. When battery monitoring was first introduced I had situations where things running in the background would be counted against whatever app was running in the foreground. Apple may have fixed that but I’ve always been a bit sceptical of the values since. Either way, despite what the battery monitor said, the battery seemed to have been used significantly quicker. The second time after I’d created the Shortcuts I’d forgotten that I’d left it in Always and was disappointed about the battery usage and then realised HAC app was still running in background. Turned it off and it’s been back to normal since even with Shortcuts using location info.
I’m not quite sure what app that screenshot is taken from but mine look like this in the Shortcuts app.
Ah right, found it … I hadn’t used that before. But in that case no, not like that. I wanted to use Automations in the Shortcuts app so that stuff just happened without me having to remember to activate things.
All good, I appreciate people taking the time to help . I’ve turned location services to Always again and will try to be more scientific about the power usage this time. So far today it’s used very little, but I’ve been sitting at home … not sure if that makes any difference.
. I’ve turned location services to Always again and will try to be more scientific about the power usage this time. So far today it’s used very little, but I’ve been sitting at home … not sure if that makes any difference.