This isn’t strictly an HA problem, because it looks like it’s a weird Android problem but HA is majorly affected by it.
I have set up automations that do things when I leave or enter my home region, like turning lights on/off, forcing off things that I might maybe have left on (e.g. coffee pot) and so on.
Lately, for maybe the past month or so, my phone has been suddenly randomly thinking I’m away. This can happen even if I haven’t left the house all day. It can go for days without happening, but other times it’s infuriatingly frequent - I had this occur more than three times in one hour once. When it happens, the HA log shows that the app reported me as away and thus ran the automation for “leaving home”.
When I look at my phone when this happens, one of the following happens (randomly):
- As soon as I unlock my phone, it suddenly realizes I’m home and the “enter home” automation runs before I can even launch the HA app.
- If I launch the HA app and look at the map, it shows me in a location within the region I set up for “work”.
- If I go to Google Maps, the dot will very briefly pinpoint me at a location near (but not at) my office, but within a few seconds it’ll suddenly jump to my house, and HA will also pick that up and the “enter home” automation runs.
- Once in a while (infrequently), the dot will stay near my office for maybe 30-40 seconds in Google Maps, but it will always jump back to my house within a minute (triggering the automation).
I’ve done some basic research on this and some posts suggest that my phone might be picking up a Wi-Fi network that, for some weird reason, has been geolocated to the wrong place. I find this really odd, especially since the point it thinks I’m at is so close to my office (on the same block). The most infuriating part of this is that when my phone suddenly thinks I’m not home, my away automation runs which could turn off the coffee pot if I’m in the middle of using it (for example).
I’ve considered things like hotspots but I don’t use mobile hotspots. The one possibility I could think of is that I did have a co-worker visit my home a while ago - definitely more than a month ago when this started though - and perhaps they used a hotspot? But that still wouldn’t make sense because these events are happening when I am home, but the logs never show it happening when I’m at work. (In that scenario I’d expect it to maybe suddenly think I’m home if my co-worker is nearby and using the same hotspot, but the opposite is happening.)
I can’t just “make my home zone bigger” because it would overlap with my work zone, and also my work zone is over 3 miles from home so it would basically think I’m home all over town.
It’s also worth pointing that other than these anomalies, the location detection and automations work exactly as I want them to. I have the home zone set to maybe a 2-block radius from my house, so that by the time I’ve actually reached my house it’s usually been long enough for the location update to pick up that I’m in the region and so by the time I actually reach my house all the automations have run as expected. But if my phone is going to keep playing this game of suddenly geolocating me 3 miles away and then snapping back, it basically makes the automatic home/away actions pointless.
I assume it’s OT to ask if there’s an Android-related fix since this seems like some sort of weird Android quirk, but is there other ways that you could suggest from HA itself to deal with this issue?
(This didn’t coincide with any Android OS or even major app update related to HA. It just started happening out of the blue.)