I just moved from FHEM with Geofency to HA. It looked really promising to see the Geolocation feature directly included in the HA App, but it does not work. I found several threads describing the issue I do experience without any solution.
I’m used to the fact that iPhone is sometimes switching the status from “always” use my location back to “while using the app”. This happened also with Geofency before. But still, it even doesn’t work properly set to always.
Do we have some more information about the architecture of the Geolocation feature like:
In which interval is the location send to the server?
What happens if the app ins in the background?
How does the “automatically close connection after 5 minutes in background” setting affect the Geolocation feature?
That would help understanding the behavior.
At the moment I do see a location update only if you open the app!
I do see a basic difference to the Geofency App I used before. In Geofency you do configure the zones in the app and the app is sending in the moment you entered the zone a webhook to the server.
It looks like that the HA app is not aware of the zones and just sending (or not sending) from time to time a location update. If this is the case, we have a huge disadvantage which will probably never achieve accurate results, right? Home automation use cases need accurate results. Otherwise, they are useless.
Basic question is there - is there are way today to make Geolocation work properly? Somebody already happy with the feature?
Some last words: After 3 weeks with HA I’m really impressed about the feature set and I do see all the work of the DE’s caring about it. Thanks for that! Probably Geolocation needs some improvement .
I have a similar problem with one of my two iPhones (the XR). With the iPhone 11, it works perfect. Both are set up with the latest IOS 16 version (though the problem already existed with IOS 10). The setup of both apps are identical. On the XR, the location setting reverts back to “While using the app” randomly after a few minutes/hours/days.
Hi Tom, all my google search did not brought me to this very helpful documentation. Thanks for that!
So, I was wrong with my assumption and the iPhone app has knowledge about the zones and should send a trigger when enter or exit a zone. Now I have to find out why this does not work.
Will go through the documentation the next days and check further. But overall, it seem to be a common issue, right?
Not sure but my phone (iphone 13, ios 15) registers me being home by the time I drive up my driveway. That may be a location update triggered by joining my wifi.
All my 3 iPhones in my household do not update reliable the location. Even opening up the iPhone app does not trigger the update anytime. How can i further troubleshoot the root cause of this? Really would like to see this working. Thanks!
I have the same issue with all the iPhones in the household (1x 13 Pro, 2x XS, 1x 8), non of them are updating either the device tracker or the geolocation - they’re all stuck at the home address.
I have tried:
to force updating the location
rebooting the phone
remove the app from the phone
reloading the app integration
All other entities for the iPhones (battery, steps, etc) are updating just fine, and I have several other devices, MacBooks and iPads, where the location and device trackers are updating just fine - but all our iPhones have this issue.
Any help would be welcomed - this is driving me nuts.
Having the same problem here with both of our iPhones (11Pro, 12). Any fixes for this? It seems like such a basic functionality that isn’t working. Is there a better way to configure geolocation?
ETA, when I look at the history on the HA companion app>Location History, it’s showing me entering/exiting the zones I’ve established and my location changes. But nothing seems to be integrating into HA?
Thanks. The app is backgrounded. I’m new to HA, so I’m probably missing something basic…
I think I may have figured it out. It looks like the companion app wasn’t connecting to HA. I’ve enabled the nabu casa service and finally have an external url entered into the app that seems to be working, but will need to do some more testing tomorrow.
.