iPhone location or alternative.
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@catmanv2 Yeah, my use case is a little more particular. I don't have an issue with never getting notification changes, they are just more delayed than I would like. I think once you get MQTT and MSR talking a 5km is going be more than relievable enough.
I had iPhone locator poll/force location refresh when I came in my driveway and triggered the magnetic sensor. I needed the location to be accurate and updated by the time I reached either my house or my building on property. The driveway is about 300m long as the crow flies for region radius purposes, and traversal to either location is much less than 45 seconds.
For what it is worth, I do see instant (and I mean instant instant) location changes like @therealdb and @gwp1 reported when the app is open or recently accessed. The delay seems to come from the app being backgrounded and the phone idle for a long period.
@gwp1 with HASS iCloud3, can you remote request a location refresh of the phone? Meaning, could I have polling suspended until I ask for an update? I think I could get exactly what I am looking for with a combination of the two and some MSR logic.
@mikereadington not an issue for me and my wife. Both set to significant, and I rarely open the app and I can say my wife is never opening it.
I’ll soon add beacons to my cars/motorcycle because home assistant has btle relay and I’ll go with esphome. It’s capable of moving btle messages to the central location and update corresponding device. Maybe it’s achievable for you too. My use case is to open/close my car gate automatically, but my driveway is short and I can place the gateway inside the house.
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On a mission to automate everything. -
@mikereadington not an issue for me and my wife. Both set to significant, and I rarely open the app and I can say my wife is never opening it.
I’ll soon add beacons to my cars/motorcycle because home assistant has btle relay and I’ll go with esphome. It’s capable of moving btle messages to the central location and update corresponding device. Maybe it’s achievable for you too. My use case is to open/close my car gate automatically, but my driveway is short and I can place the gateway inside the house.
@therealdb wow, that is what I was just looking at beacons. Looks promising if they are reliable.
I don't have gates, but I would not mind a few automated defensive turrets.
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@therealdb wow, that is what I was just looking at beacons. Looks promising if they are reliable.
I don't have gates, but I would not mind a few automated defensive turrets.
@mikereadington I tried beacons; was not successful.
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The issue with IPhoneLocator happened to me a few months ago. @amg0 was away on vacation, and did comment that Apple may have changed the API, and it wasn’t well documented. A few days later, it started working again.
The geofencing issues in Vera, along with Ezlo’s lack of geofencing, pushed me over the edge with Vera/Ezlo. I moved over to Home Assistant a few weeks ago, along with MSR, and overall it’s been much more stable. I’m also just using Home Assistant’s built in geofencing, and it’s working well.
I still have Vera running, as I’m not 100% migrated, but I’m close.
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So I now have two phones that appear to be working just fine in terms of the Owntracks notifications. Clearly it's early days but I wonder if some of the issues that I have perceived are that although Owntracks is reporting to MQQT almost instantly, the screen notifications are not...
C
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Not sure if @gwp1 was trying the new support in HASS, but I'm leaning a link anyway https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/ibeacon
@therealdb I was not - I will look into this.
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I may have spoken too soon. Mrs C's phone still claims to not be home. I suspect a config error on the phone however given it triggered correctly when she left the region
<edit>
I managed to pry her phone away and check the settings. Her region had vanished. I've seen this once on mine and assumed it was because we had the same RegionName (hence mine being Home2) but clearly not.Having re-created the region and published, the entity changed state as expected.
The region was clearly there when she exited this morning (as the entity changed from 'null' to 'false') so this will need to be watched.
Maybe it's just 'Home' it does not like as a region name <shrug>
C
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I may have spoken too soon. Mrs C's phone still claims to not be home. I suspect a config error on the phone however given it triggered correctly when she left the region
<edit>
I managed to pry her phone away and check the settings. Her region had vanished. I've seen this once on mine and assumed it was because we had the same RegionName (hence mine being Home2) but clearly not.Having re-created the region and published, the entity changed state as expected.
The region was clearly there when she exited this morning (as the entity changed from 'null' to 'false') so this will need to be watched.
Maybe it's just 'Home' it does not like as a region name <shrug>
C
@catmanv2 Changes to
userand a couple other settings will remove all regions.*Hubitat C-7 2.4.1.151
*Proxmox VE v8, Beelink MiniPC 12GBs, SSD*HASS 2025.3.4
w/ ZST10-700 fw 7.18.3*Prod MSR in docker/portainer
MSR: latest-25082-3c348de6
MQTTController: 24257
ZWave Controller: 25082 -
OK so this is mostly good. There is less functionality than iPhone locator (i.e. ETA isn't trrivial to get out) but still not 100% reliable. I was travelling from Friday to yesterday. I failed to get an update that I'd 'got home' yesterday PM. Mrs C was at home all that time, going to work and back, and reported perfectly so I have to assume it's a configuration / implementation on my phone.
C
The Ex-Vera abuser know as CatmanV2.....
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OK so this is mostly good. There is less functionality than iPhone locator (i.e. ETA isn't trrivial to get out) but still not 100% reliable. I was travelling from Friday to yesterday. I failed to get an update that I'd 'got home' yesterday PM. Mrs C was at home all that time, going to work and back, and reported perfectly so I have to assume it's a configuration / implementation on my phone.
C
@catmanv2 Same here, it works but not 100% reliable. A few misses that seem to correlate to if I am on the phone or not. I really miss the reliability iPhone locator.
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It's 100% reliable for me and my Wifi routers are doing the 0,001% of the edge cases.
I'm using my WIFI routers to confirm I'm home (when it's not triggering directlty) and I'll soon add ESPresence to the mix (mainly for cars, but we'll see).--
On a mission to automate everything. -
It's 100% reliable for me and my Wifi routers are doing the 0,001% of the edge cases.
I'm using my WIFI routers to confirm I'm home (when it's not triggering directlty) and I'll soon add ESPresence to the mix (mainly for cars, but we'll see).@therealdb are you EU or US? I suspect there's some data 'protection' witchery going on. Or at least some phone based config that is not directly in the app itself. (I mean my phone is always asking me if I want such and such an app to continue to access my location. I imagine missing one of those notifications is going to break stuff....)
C
The Ex-Vera abuser know as CatmanV2.....
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@therealdb are you EU or US? I suspect there's some data 'protection' witchery going on. Or at least some phone based config that is not directly in the app itself. (I mean my phone is always asking me if I want such and such an app to continue to access my location. I imagine missing one of those notifications is going to break stuff....)
C
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So came home tonight. My phone says 'entering home'. MSR doesn't. Not had a dig yet
<Edit>
OK that's interesting. Owntracks was reporting that the network was down. I have a. VPN to my home system, which doesn't respond if you're on the network (if that make sense).
As soon as I disconnected from the VPN, bingo. Soooooo need to either sort out the VPN from local (which seems daft) or get some automatic disconnect.
C
The Ex-Vera abuser know as CatmanV2.....
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So came home tonight. My phone says 'entering home'. MSR doesn't. Not had a dig yet
<Edit>
OK that's interesting. Owntracks was reporting that the network was down. I have a. VPN to my home system, which doesn't respond if you're on the network (if that make sense).
As soon as I disconnected from the VPN, bingo. Soooooo need to either sort out the VPN from local (which seems daft) or get some automatic disconnect.
C
@catmanv2 that's why I'm publishing to an http endpoint that's relaying the message inside my mqtt server (internal). Maybe a public mqtt broker linked to your internal one is easier.
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On a mission to automate everything. -
@catmanv2 that's why I'm publishing to an http endpoint that's relaying the message inside my mqtt server (internal). Maybe a public mqtt broker linked to your internal one is easier.
@therealdb thing is I know from other apps that when the phone transitions from 4(5)G to WiFi and is connected on the VPN it loses connectivity. I knew this intellectually but now I know it in my bones as it were.
So it won't talk to the HTTP endpoint either...... It won't talk to anything.
I've seen it often enough with mail and Slack but never really added two and two
C
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It’s funny, back in August there was an issue with iPhoneLocator. It was an add-on integration that I couldn’t live without. It fixed itself magically after 3 or 4 days, but it put me on the road to looking for a Vera alternative.
Ezlo kept making promises, but I felt like I was going to be kept being strung along if I switched to Ezlo. It felt like they were stringing users along with basic functionality, like geofencing.
In September I switched to Home Assistant, and I haven’t looked back. Everything works so much better. The built in geofencing of the companion app works flawlessly. I have four users, that just needed an account on my instance, and I know if they are home or not, and I can depend on it for my automation.
Integrations that stopped working or worked unreliably on Vera years ago work perfectly. My Nest thermostat works again with my home automation. I can use Google Calendar with ease.
Not to disparage Vera for the innovation they did years ago, but for anyone still on the platform, run! Vera has essentially been abandoned
