Hello all,
I have the same issues with the Homey presence detection. I made a reliable workaround for the time being(iOS only, Homekit app required). I made 1 virtual switch for each device, and 2 flows in Homey; home/away. When virtual device is turned off; person is gone, turned on; person is home. Then, I made 2 automations inside the iOS Home app, to, when a person leaves switch the virtual device off. When the person comes home; switch on.
A decent support backend (which every company that is selling consumer products should use) will automatically point users towards solutions if it can infer from the support request (whether it’s coming in through e-mail, a web form, a Slack message, etc) that there’s already a knowledge base article or precooked answer available. Bluntly put: a lot of users are either stupid or act like snowflakes thinking their problems are unique.
Besides that, I’m missing community workarounds from their knowledge base. Things like “if half of your light bulbs don’t switch from a flow, add delays” or “if your Homey regularly becomes unstable, reboot it every night” or “if your Homey starts acting strangely, replace its power supply”. Because that would mean admitting that Homey has some well-known and (apparently) unfixable issues.
Which brings me back to what I already said: this new setup is mostly meant to make it harder for users to submit support requests.
Today I got an answer from Athom regarding the Home/Away issue when using the Homey App on a iPhone with iOS15 or later.
Athom is aware of this issue and created a support ticket at Apple.
The problem presented by IOS.15 is the following, to give you some background information by Athom:
"Our app transmits the location of your house to your iPhone (a geofence). The iPhone then keeps track of where a user goes etc. When you enter or leave that zone of the house (the geofence), it should let the Homey app know. The problem now is that when our app is closed, the iPhone should first start our app in the background so that it can forward this message. Starting our app by your iPhone sometimes works/sometimes not. Due to this randomness, flows and background tasks don’t work as they should and that’s what Apple will have to fix in a new iOS update.
The only workaround there is is to always leave the Homey app on in the background, but that is not a nice workable situation and that is why an update from Apple really needs to follow. "
I also asked why other apps on my iPhone which using geofence as well do not have this issue. The answer from Athom on my question is:
"Unfortunately, we have no insight into how other apps are composed, but Tado probably uses a different API in connection with geofencing. It’s not all apps that have been affected by this iOS update, but quite a few.
Because it may take a while before this issue is included by Apple in a new iOS update, I hereby close the ticket. We will do our best to notify all users who reported the issue as soon as this fix is available."
So… we have to wait and I suppose a long time before it will be solved…
Is there anyway i can manually adjust the range of the geofence? Something like tado does?
Not that I am aware of. The geofence zone is adjustable in Tado and HomeKit but not in Homey.
Yet many Apps including Home Assistant work perfectly fine.
I’m no Apple software engineer but wouldn’t there just be one API and system for Geofencing within the IOS system…
Again , they won’t say or explain the actual technical reason for the issue , just it’s an apple thing… Very vague …
I personally think the Homey App is at fault. I think Athom have been so busy with their Bridge project that they just haven’t spent the time to upgrade the Homey App to meet the new IOS 15 specification.,
This might also explain why the Pro now only just get’s minor patch’s and tweaks with no new features. Homey OS really hasn’t progressed much at all over the last two years other than cloud backups and a WebUI.
Too busy with the Bridge/Cloud…
