Problem with device tracking - please help

[hpoperator (Andy)]

Hello dear community,

I currently have a problem with location tracking.
I am using the HA app on my wife’s smartphone and on mine and have also enabled all the required entities.
It is correctly detected when someone is in the “home area” (so the router detects a presence), but beyond that no display takes place. When I or my wife leave the home area, no location tracking takes place and HA still shows the device as a circle in the home area.
(See screenshot).

What do I have to set for the tracking to work properly?
(We both use Android)

I would really appreciate it if you could help me.

Kind regards

[clempat (Clement)]

Hi @hpoperator,

Did you add the devices under the person name ?

Go to People:

Click on your name and check what devices are listed.

PS: I may be wrong, it may work differently between device tracker and the mobile app.

[hpoperator (Andy)]

thank you for the quick reply.
The entities are assigned to the respective persons

[clempat (Clement)]

If I understand good, both of your entities are saying not_home, but you still appear “Home” in your dashboard?

I think as soon one is detected home, you will be considered at home.

[hpoperator (Andy)]

exactly, my wife is not at home, but in the map it is shown as home. Conversely, your real current location is not shown to me. The entity strangely outputs the following:

source_type: gps
latitude: 4x.xxxxxxx
longitude: 6.xxxxxx
gps_accuracy: 20
altitude: 342
course: 0
speed: 0
vertical_accuracy: 1
friendly_name: soravi

and these coordinates are in the home zone.
Although she is just about 30km away. Now I would like your correct location to be shown to me on the map as well.

Because only if this happens, I can also plan with the work zone and also use the location map correctly.

[hpoperator (Andy)]

has no one an idea?

[clempat (Clement)]

If I resume the problem. The app is giving you the wrong coordinates. I am not sure what could be the issue.

I would do some tries like going away and open Home Assistant and check.

I imagine as well that you need Home Assistant cloud activated to let the mobile send the information to your instance.

[anon94216691]

@hpoperator Have you subscrived to Nabu Casa cloud?
Otherwise the companion app can’t be used as a device tracker when away as there is no way to tell your HA instance the location updates…

[k8gg]

Andreas is correct.
You would have to figure out a setup in a way that your phones can reach your HA server from outside, so that to update the location of the phone back to HA.

If not Nabu Casa, there are many other less simple (but free) ways also. You could do Duck DNS + NGINX Home Assistant SSL proxy + opening a port mapping on your router, you could do VPN, you could do ZeroTier or Tailscale.