Why is Home/Away not more simple for multiple people (Geofencing)?

I would like to preface this by saying HA is absolutely incredible and all the work from paid and volunteers is amazing!

My gripe is aimed at making HA more accessible to people brand new to it. Why do we lack an incredibly simple way to trigger or use whether a home or zone is occupied at all? I’ve introduce a few people to HA and they struggle to trigger automations when the last person leaves home or the first person arrives home. It’s incredibly confusing to someone new.

Why don’t we have an easy trigger when a zone becomes unoccupied or occupied? It really needs to be in the GUI. And why don’t we have a simple tutorial to add a few simple devices, like lights, setup 2 people, and create a basic automation for the home becoming occupied or unoccupied?

I’ve used a manually created family group in yaml config. I’m currently using triggers when zone.home goes to 0 or rises above zero. Both are incredibly unintuitive to new users. It’s possible this exists already but I couldn’t find it with some Googling just now. Even if we have something I’m missing, I think we need to do a better job of making it a core piece and front and center.

I’m willing to help on this any way I’m capable. I think it would drive adoption at least some.

A numeric state trigger using the zone entity. All doable from the ui. The main state of the entity is the number of people in the zone.

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Basic presence detection is one of the few articles in the Getting Started section of the docs, immediately preceded by the most basic Automation tutorial.

What improvements or additions do you think are needed to that article?

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Your misunderstanding how it works does not mean it is not there.

Reading the docs is really an awesome way to understand the product.

During WTH I like to look to other smart home platforms for inspiration on what could be easier than it is on HA today.

When I add a new light in HomeKit it immediately prompts me “should I add either of these automations: turn off when the last person leaves home? Turn on when the first person arrives home?”

Clearly Apple thinks that the presence automations are very popular (or valuable?) so maybe HA could take inspiration… perhaps add these as blueprints out of the box or find other ways to help brand new users who haven’t even found the documentation yet.

I also had the same need, it’s not straightforward, but I share my founding.

Create a template helper (binary / occupancy), with this template:

{{ states.person | selectattr('state','eq','home') | list | count > 0 }}

This comes from this answer:

Didn’t see this but my idea would be WTH, Default Anyone Home sensor - #3 by jameson_uk
have an anyone home sensor out the box and/or a condition you can just select in automations of anyone home

This is my point. It shouldn’t require a brand new person to understand numeric state entities. Or that every automation needs a test for the number in the zone being 0 or above 0. Yes, that’s doable, but it’s not intuitive and requires more steps than a simple trigger for “Zone becomes occupied” or unoccupied.

Pretty much every other smart home app I’ve used that uses geofencing has an extremely simple “when everyone leaves” or “when the first person arrives home”. We don’t. I don’t understand that or why we’re so closed minded as a community about that.

Every person I’ve helped setup HA couldn’t figure it out and I had to show them. Some of them asked where the simple trigger and when I explained the numeric state they couldn’t believe that’s the simplest way to do it.

We already have it for an entity entering a zone. But we don’t have a basic geofencing for multiple tracked devices in a zone.

That’s what I feel like needs to change. I know how to do it. It’s not an issue for me. But I know it’s been an issue with a lot of new HA users that I’ve helped.

I’m familiar with that and it’s good to setup presence detection. But it doesn’t explain multiple person presence at all.

Almost anyone with 2 or more people in a home wants lights, HVAC, etc to change when the house becomes unoccupied and certain things to happen when the house is empty and someone arrives home. I haven’t been able to find documentation explaining that and my opinion is that it should be an easy GUI trigger without numeric states.