Ditto… Seeing the same behaviour.
This is different to the IOS app where zone tracking seems to work.
Same here,.only reporting when in a zone, not reporting away otherwise, which is useless. Even after opening the app, or killing and restarting the app does not make it report away.
It seems that when only zone based tracking is turned on, the location tracking stops working after a certain time. i have to disable and enable it again to make it work again.
I think this is a imitation of android, not the HA android android app. You can try this by opening Google maps and check where you are located there. Click the GPS icon and it will update your location and then HA will get the update as well.
Battery optimisation is disabled.
No it won’t, with indeed battery optimisation disabled In the mean time it totally stopped working. Updating location in google maps, then opening Home Assistant app and toggling zone based tracking off and on again does not do anything…
I mean Owntracks was unrealiable, but this is plain useless.
Yeah, I’m not sure what happened but my android app stopped working a while back. I can’t get it to read anything tracking or battery wise.
I haven’t tried to uninstall/reinstall yet but the reliability is definitely not looking to good right now.
Same here … Need to open the app …
For those having location tracking issues please check the 2 troubleshooting steps we have here (After updating Android app to 1.7.0 and HA to 0.105):
And if that fails then do:
Maybe the app is just totally unclear. For zone based tracking do I only need to enable the zone based tracking. Or, which is totally not obvious from the app, do I also need to check background location tracking? I only have the first option turned on.
I have both on, and for me it works quite well. May also depend on your android version/brand though, some manufacturers optimize for battery so much nothing can do anything when not open in foreground 
You want both. One you want your phone to report when it exits/enters a zone and two you want it to report when the app is in the background.
Yes, both make it work, however, I still think explanation is not clear. The zone based option suggests this would be all you need.
Well the zone based tracking mentions that it pulls HA zone information to setup as geofences. The background toggle mentions that it updates periodically in the background. So the descriptions are indeed unique to them. Might just be a misunderstanding. You want both toggles on so updates happen as fast as they can, thats really gist of it.
The geofencing in Android is an API feature so nothing that Home Assistant can make work better: https://developers.google.com/location-context/geofencing
In the options of Android there is an option to let search for wifi networks always to help positioning. Someone has tried it to see if it helps?
Looking at the history, I can see the new “Geocoded Location” changes faster than the zone one. I suppose this element gets the data from the background updates option. If we deactivate the zone location in the app, will work the zone detection using the background updates? I will try it.
Don’t look at the just the zone information look at the GPS coordinates for the entity. As of now all the sensors provided by the mobile app update when the app sends in the location. So one is not updating faster than the other as the updates arrive at the same time.
Thanks for your answer here and in github: https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant-android/issues/497 
After discussing this there, it seems that there is a parameter about inaccuracy/precision at the GPS data, and if it is not good, the Zone tracker does not change. I don’t know how conservative this parameter is, but it seems that maybe too much according to my findings.