What happens with location when phone looses internet for extensive time

Mobile Apps
1

I have been trying to google and searched this forum but no hints.

What happens to location and home/not home status when phone is broken / switched off / at other country and roaming disabled for longer time?

Will phone (and person) just stay in last sent location for ever or after some timeout change to unknown/not availabe (and what does that mean with at home/away status?)

3

If HA restarts and all device trackers linked to a person are unknown or unavailable the person entity will be unknown.

1 Like
4

Why would HA restart? Case was location not updated in days or months for phone and app not connecting (because phone died/camping in wilderness/etc)

5

Presuming you had access to Home Assistant on a computer, you would just unlink that device from the person.

6

Why should I delete my phone if i go for vacation with no internet for example?

I just want to know what happens on case not covered in documentation I have found so far, not fix anything per se.
Though I think there should be some timeout for location and could consider it a bug if it forever just stays at last update.

7

Yup, that’s what it does, stay at the last update forever, which is exactly what should happen. You might not even have internet access when you are on vacation - so you want your house to start behaving like you are at home which you are on vacation for longer than the hypothetical timeout?

8

Mostly I am actually concerned will I remain indefinitely “at home” and house acting like I am, when I actually left but phone not able to send update for whatever reason.

Need to investigate if I can force away if no update in 12h or something.

9

Yup, pretty easy to do.
Create an automation that triggers if the state is home for X hours.
Ideally you would also want a network based tracker too, whether via the access point, a router or even just ping.
You’d confirm the state of this sensor is not_home (Away in the GUI).
Then you would have an action that executes the device_tracker.see service with a latitude and longitude far away from home so that it marks you as not_home (Away in the GUI)