Presence detection via iOS Shortcuts app?

Presence detection has proven to be challenging. It’s always just worked for my iPhone via the HA Companion app, but it doesn’t work well for my wife’s iPhone. I’ve deleted her entities from HA, deleted the HA Companion app, reinstalled… without success. I’ve started to rely on presence detection by WiFi, which isn’t as responsive as I’d like. I’ve set up a couple Personal Automations in the iOS Shortcuts app, and it appears to be possible to trigger automations upon arrival and upon leaving locations. I’m wondering if anyone is firing HA events using location reported by Shortcuts.

I have not but it shouldn’t be too hard to fire off a webhook when arriving home and have that as a trigger for an automation/binary sensor. I don’t think that would require opening the app like some do (Bluetooth connection)

No, it doesn’t. You’re right. I just got started with Personal Automations a week or so ago, and right now I’m just using it for morning routines: when my wake-up alarm is stopped (and without opening any apps), Shortcuts fires an event in HA that I use in Node-RED to turn on lights, etc… but that flow has some logic that is dependent on whether my wife is home. Usually it works OK, but this morning HA showed her as “home” when in fact she’d already left, so the Node-RED flow didn’t turn on all of the lights I wanted on.

I’ve had good luck with my family using life360 integration. It’s pretty responsive. It is cloud based so YMMV.

What are you using for wifi detection? There’s a few that you may be able to test out to see which one is better. Ping vs nmap vs your router integration (UniFi/asus/openwrt/etc)

Asus router integration. It’s not bad, it just takes 5-10 minutes to update sometimes.

Ping seems to be pretty quick. Maybe it will be more reliable

Actually, presence detection has started working well enough again recently. Time will tell if it holds.

I had a hard time with reliable presence detection using my iPhone as well (bluetooth tracker), it worked pretty well but at random times (usually while the phone was locked for too long) it would switch to away mode while I was still home. I switched to a BlueCharm beacon (after reading another post on this forum), and so far it’s been working great. The only issue I had was that HA didn’t autodetect the new device, and so I had to manually add the MAC address to known_hosts.yaml. Personally, I prefer this setup as I keep the beacon in my handbag, and use the bag for presence detection, which works out to be a better item for tracking my home/away status compared to only my phone.