Zone detection not working on iPhone when reported location is set to "Zone only"

Mobile Apps Home Assistant Companion for Apple
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1

Hi all,

I’m trying to understand why Zone only location reporting works on my iPhone, but not on my wife’s.

We both have the same iPhone model with the same relevant setup (Home Assistant Companion App, WireGuard VPN, Location permission: Always, Precise Location enabled, Backgroud App Refresh enabled).

On my phone, the setting Companion App > Servers > Privacy > Location Sent > Zone only works correctly. Home Assistant detects when I’m home or away.

On my wife’s phone, presence detection only works when Location Sent is set to Exact. If I change it to Zone only, Home Assistant reports her as away even when she is at home.

The main difference I found is under Companion App > Location: On my phone, I see a “Home” section (showing Enter/Exit tracked, Location, Radius).

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On my wife’s phone, this entire “Home” section is missing.

I’ve already tried the usual troubleshooting steps on her phone (Log out and back in, Temporarily make her an administrator, Reinstall the Companion App). Unfortunately, without luck.

My assumption is that her Companion App does not know about the Home zone locally. So for her, the zone detection only works when exact location is reported and the Home Assistant server can decide whether she’s in the Home zone or not.

I’d prefer to use the more privacy-preserving Zone only setting on her phone as well.

Does anyone know why the Home zone would be missing from the Companion App’s Location settings and how I can get the app to recognize/track it again? Is there another requirement for Zone only reporting that I’m overlooking?

Cheers,
Max

2

Maybe worth checking whether HA’s push notification permission is granted on your wife’s phone (Settings > Notifications > Home Assistant)? Zone-only tracking on iOS relies on native geofencing tied to silent push, and if that permission was never granted, the Companion App has nothing to hang zone monitoring off, which could explain the Home section being missing entirely rather than just out of sync.

3

Thanks for the explanation and good catch, @clu. Notifications were indeed turned off on her device.

However, I haven’t been able to resolve the problem yet. The Home zone did not appear after enabling all notifications. Afterwards, I also did another round of logging her out and back in, as well as setting a new device name for her phone (trying the shotgun-fix approach, yay).

I think I’ll start over with her setup once more, keeping the notifications in mind: Creating a new user in HA for her, re-installing the app, setting a new device name, etc.

I’d still be curious whether there are any further things I could try to get her Companion App to detect zone changes.

4

Yeah, I’m not sure about that one. My wife and family use PositionGuard for area monitoring instead. Here’s a link to the HA integration: GitHub - positionguard/positionguard-homeassistant: Privacy-first family location for Home Assistant — area-level presence, no exact coordinates. · GitHub

Full disclosure, I’m the developer. I use the Companion App myself, but had a hard time getting my family to adopt it reliably, so I built something else for that.