iPhone location or alternative.

[MikeReadington]

Reposting here because core people seem to be here daily.

Hello Everyone,

I am using iPhone locator on Vera, and yesterday it stopped working. Looking at the logs, I can see the connection is refused, but nothing on my end changed. iPhone locator is really important in my particular setup, so I guess I have two questions.

Is it broken, or is it me?
I don't see anyone else saying there is an issue, but I am not sure how many people are still using it (or Vera for location) at this point. I installed it on a blank Vera test controller, same issue. It might be something with the iCloud account, but it works everywhere else.

Is there something similar on another platform?

Mainly what I would like is the ability to force a poll of iCloud location on demand. I have a bunch of triggers setup, including magnetic sensors in my driveway to sense vehicles and determine if the motion is egress or ingress. These triggers in conjunction with MSR have been a great way to double check phone location, and I would hate to lose this functionality. It looks like HA might have something with "iCloud3". Is anyone using it?

Thanks,
Mike

[therealdb]

Many of us here are using OwnTracks. It’s very reliable for me/my wife and it’s instant. Take a look at old discussions.

[MikeReadington]

@therealdb Thanks DB. I also looked at that, but I will check it out more thoroughly.

I wanted to try to keep the force refresh option available, but looking quickly, I didn't think there was a way to do that. I really liked the behavior of asking the phone, "where do you think you are, and do me a favor and double-check just to be sure." Using that one feature stopped a lot of delayed or false location reports during a critical event, but in fairness, maybe this stuff has gotten good enough that it won't be an issue.

[CatmanV2]

@therealdb I;ve had to delete it for the now. Too much stuff going on to look at it, but seemed the notifications on the phone were pretty random.

I will revisit at some point

C

[therealdb]

@mikereadington it’s constantly refreshing, so your use case doesn’t seems to be useful in my scenario.

@CatmanV2 yes, don’t use the messages as they come. You need to filter them. I’m using global variables to maintain the status, but maybe the new metadata could be enough.

[CatmanV2]

@therealdb yeah I need to find time to sit down and deal with it / understand it properly.

C

[CatmanV2]

Looks like it's an overall thing. I've just checked the two devices on OpenLuup. Both of them are reporting 'No Devices for this account, check network/credentials'

They can been seen on Find my. The user and pass are correct. Logs

2022-10-07 17:54:39.684   luup_log:55: IPhoneLocator: iCloud refused access, Check credentials ?

My logs only go back to yesterday but this appears consistent since then.

(I know I'm not sticking to the posting guides but I'm not actually asking for help simply confirming that it seems rather bust)

C

[CatmanV2]

I see @amg0 has an account but also has never posted. The code hasn't been updated for some years. I'll have a poke at some of the settings (on the phone) but I'm not hopeful....

C

[CatmanV2]

Final note I suspect: My device checked in 1707 05/10/2022 BST and has not checked out since
Mrs C's device checked out 0800 05/10/2022 BST and never checked in, although she came home at about 1800 that night (it was our wedding anniversary so we're pretty clear on that)

So that narrows down the window a chunk....

C

[MikeReadington]

@CatmanV2 Well, at least I know it was not just me. I knew this day was coming because he had said something in August when it was broken that he didn't know if it was fixable because of Apple's API. I am thinking they kicked everything that did not use 2FA authentication.

@therealdb I set up Owntracks on Hubitat because it was easy, and I could play with it. Looks like it is very flexible. How hard is it on the battery? I realize mileage will vary a lot on this, but that was a feature I liked about the iPhone locator app. It ran using Apple's "Find My" that was already running on the phone. It's slow to update, but if I needed to know where the phone was, I would force a poll of location from the app. Since I started refining my logic in MSR I have been using manual polling almost exclusively. Thanks again for the point in this direction.

[MikeReadington]

Something of note from OwnTracks with iOS.

"Why do location publishes sometimes seem to cease to work?
Here's what happens:
If the app goes into Background, the connection is disconnected because the app cannot maintain the TCP connection in background.
If you bring the app back into foreground, the app will re-connect.
When a location change is recorded (no matter if manual, significant, move or region mode), a message is prepared and an attempt to connect to the broker is started. If there is an error, connect will be retried after 2, 4, 8, ..., 64, 64, .... seconds until it succeeds.
BUT...
If the application is in background or is sent to the background, retries are restarted eventually - depending on iOS' background execution model about every 10 minutes.
With automatic modes switched off, even when bringing the app to foreground, no new location updates are generated."

[CatmanV2]

@mikereadington said in iPhone location or alternative.:

I am thinking they kicked everything that did not use 2FA authentication.

Quite quite possible

C

[CatmanV2]

@mikereadington and this precisely explains the issues I saw. And makes perfect sense (I'm engaged with a company that is developing an a for iOS and Apple's restrictions and what happens when an App backgrounds (read 'is stopped') are quite severe.

Taking this, and my own recent experience into account, I don't think Owntracks is going to be viable. In fact, given the limitations from Apple I'm not sure anything is going to be viable for a geofence

C

[therealdb]

iOS has a background system to preserve battery life. It’s designed to be reliable and to not impact battery life. If you define your zones (I have home and office) at the very same moment you’ll cross the boundaries, a message is sent. I’m on my 2nd year with the system and never missed a bit. I also have a Bayesian sensor to detect if I’m connected to WiFi, and this is used as a second factor to confirm I’m home. But generally speaking, the entry/exit is totally demanded to OwnTracks.

[CatmanV2]

@therealdb It is indeed so designed, but that's not what I am seeing in terms of behaviour. Of course I may have misconfigured it on my phone so I am happy to be corrected!

(but I'll probably bug you for help)

But not right now

C

[gwp1]

@CatmanV2 I concur with @therealdb here, I've been using the OwnTracks on iOS via the Hubitat app integrations and it works well. I also use, as a secondary, a Home Assistant integration called iCloud3 which mitigates the 2FA issues you found with iPhone Locator. I've seen no noticeable battery issues (once I had iC3 configured correctly.)

@toggledbits got me into OwnTracks when he had his Logo trial up and running.

[CatmanV2]

Well I fully expect to be wrong I know that Geolocation is one of the use cases that Apple permit (or at least tolerate) in their process (and it's documented in the Owntracks literature as well as being the workaround for our devs.

I strongly suspect I fubarred the config somewhere (possibly as basic as not allowing full location services, for example). I had a crack this morning and I have the phone claiming it's connected, and reactor claiming it's connected (yay)

I need to get the entity installed but that's another day

C

[CatmanV2]

Trying to follow the posting guidelines.....

  - id: mqqt
    enabled: true
    implementation: MQTTController
    name: Mosquito
    config:
      source: "mqtt://192.168.70.249:8883/"
      username: xxxxx 
      password: xxxxx
      entities:
        catman_iphone:
          name: "Catman Phone"
          topic: FFCEB043-B975-490E-B051-198473F6A504
          uses_template: owntracks_in_region

Claims to be valid YAML in https://yamlchecker.com/

But when I add the last 4 lines to my reactor.yaml msr will not start:

Reactor log stops:

[latest-22274]2022-10-08T17:32:39.316Z <Engine:NOTICE> [Engine]Engine#1 has shut down.
[latest-22274]2022-10-08T17:32:39.316Z <app:NOTICE> Closing Structure...
[latest-22274]2022-10-08T17:32:39.317Z <Structure:INFO> Structure#1 Stopping controllers...
[latest-22274]2022-10-08T17:32:39.317Z <VeraController:NOTICE> VeraController#vera stopping
[latest-22274]2022-10-08T17:32:39.321Z <VeraController:ERR> Controller VeraController#vera is off-line!
[latest-22274]2022-10-08T17:32:39.366Z <MQTTController:NOTICE> MQTTController#mqqt stopping, sending LWT
[latest-22274]2022-10-08T17:32:39.366Z <DynamicGroupController:NOTICE> DynamicGroupController#groups stopping
[latest-22274]2022-10-08T17:32:39.369Z <DynamicGroupController:ERR> Controller DynamicGroupController#groups is off-line!
[latest-22274]2022-10-08T17:32:39.369Z <SystemController:NOTICE> SystemController#reactor_system stopping
[latest-22274]2022-10-08T17:32:39.371Z <SystemController:ERR> Controller SystemController#reactor_system is off-line!
[latest-22274]2022-10-08T17:32:39.372Z <Structure:INFO> Structure#1 Final data sync...
[latest-22274]2022-10-08T17:32:39.379Z <Structure:NOTICE> Structure Structure#1 stopped
[latest-22274]2022-10-08T17:32:39.379Z <app:NOTICE> Stopping timers...
[latest-22274]2022-10-08T17:32:39.380Z <app:NOTICE> Shutdown complete, process ID 27723

As soon as I replace the original version of reactor.yaml

  - id: mqqt
    enabled: true
    implementation: MQTTController
    name: Mosquito
    config:
      source: "mqtt://192.168.70.249:8883/"
      username: xxxx 
      password: xxxx

Everything springs to life.

I can't see an error in my syntax. Do I need to have the region in there (although I've tried both with and without)

It's going to be something obvious / stupid but hopefully I'm learning at least a little

TIA

C

[therealdb]

@catmanv2 the logs are not complaining, so maybe the error was written before.

values are escaped with " in the docs, give it a try (ie: "catman_iphone" and topic: "FFCEB043-B975-490E-B051-198473F6A504")

[CatmanV2]

Thanks

Tried

  entities:
        catman_iphone:
          name: "Catman Phone"
          topic: "FFCEB043-B975-490E-B051-198473F6A504"
          uses_template: owntracks_in_region
          regionName: Home

and

  entities:
        "catman_iphone":
          name: "Catman Phone"
          topic: "FFCEB043-B975-490E-B051-198473F6A504"
          uses_template: owntracks_in_region
          regionName: Home

With no discernible difference

C