Android devices observed with private BLE device seem to have gappy histories and I cant really use them reliably for automations as is. Has anyone seen this?
That’s exacty I don’t feed the ble directly into the agent for where am I.
It gets tempered through two layers of other math…
BLE by itself for presence… Even th best ones rn imho is too flappy without something like a classifier or other systems helping.
Do you have anything on the phone actively sending data? If the phone has no reason to advertise then HA won’t see anything to detect. The easiest fix is to enable the iBeacon transmitter in the companion app on your phone. You could set the rate to low, but I suggest keeping the power high or medium for reliable detection.
You don’t need to use the iBeacon integration - the point is just to force the phone to send something, then the private ble device integration will be able to identify it based on the resolvable MAC address.
Once you know the phone is reliably transmitting, if you still have issues look at your proxies to make sure they have good configs and recent (this month) firmware. If you’re using a usb dongle on your HA host then poor results are pretty well par for the course.
Data point from a house with one of each: the Android is tracked by broadcasting iBeacon from the companion app, the iPhone by IRK resolution, and both are measured by the same four ESP32 proxies. Over the last 7 days, counting only gaps shorter than 5 minutes so trips out don’t count, the Android lost its distance reading 14.4 times per hour of visibility against 0.42 for the iPhone, with a median gap of 55 seconds against 15. Those short gaps add up to 35% of the time the Android was otherwise reporting, so the transmitter is doing something but it hasn’t got us near the iPhone. I don’t know why the difference is that big and I only have the one Android to go on.
A caveat on my own numbers, and it’s on me: I went back and read the transmitter settings afterwards, and the power is on ultraLow, below the high or medium you suggested, though the advertise mode is on lowPower which you said was fine. So what I posted is what a half-configured transmitter gives you rather than iBeacon set up the way you described. It also isn’t a fair comparison with the iPhone, since there’s no companion-app transmitter on that side at all and it’s tracked purely by IRK.