the presence function from my Homey Pro 2025 is not working any more. Not for me but also not for another account, and two guests of the house.
We all have different iPhones with different iOS versions (probably the latest). In all iPhone settings → privacy → locationservices → tracking is on ALWAYS (so on). In the homey app settings the location is pinned on the right address and in all the 4 profile settings ‘use home / away detection’ is on.
Anyone some more suggestions? I restarted the Homey already; its on his last software version.
Ive had similar issues in last couple of weeks, Homey Pro detects my iPhone leaving but not returning - it was working fine but can’t see any obvious reason for this. I have changed my network provider but this shouldn’t have any impact.
Your not the first having issues with built-inn presence function of Homey. And in my case the fence was way to big.
So I installed the iOs-app ‘Locative’.
With this app I can adjust the diameter of the geofence and can have 19 other locations besides home. E.g ‘leave work/school’ and so on.
Issue still persists despite all the troubleshooting. Including verifying settings and access, uninstalling and reinstalling the app. Any additional recommendations? Didn’t want to install another app on the phone to make Homey detection work, seems a bit like something i would have to do with HA.
hey everyone,
I wrote a tutorial about how I implemented presence detection in Homey en way that I find to be more robust than the Homey App itself.
This might help you if you also have an iOS device:
One thing that consistently worked well for me during the 2+ years I used Home Assistant was presence detection, but the number of bugs and update-related issues eventually pushed me to try Homey, which has been working well overall.
I’m on Android and it seems to be working fine, while my wife uses an iPhone. It worked well for her too until about a week ago. My hesitation is that I’d rather not start building workarounds again. In Home Assistant I eventually ended up with a setup that was about 75% working as expected and 25% ongoing fixes and maintenance, which is what I’m hoping to avoid this time around.
Yeah the think is that no app on both android or iOS has as much control over location services as the native automation libraries. The os restrict the access to the locations services through the api layer. This is to prevent apps from draining the battery by unnecessarily requesting locations while the app is not running. Basically, an app can be in a number of different states, and the accuracy of the location and the frequency at which the app receives location updates changes based on the status of the app. An app can be fully closed and not running in the background, An app can be running in the foreground, an app can be running in the background whilst completing a task, an app can be running in the background whilst being idle. An app can subscribe to location changes, but it cannot know when the location change is triggered and to how many meters that location change is accurate. This makes it really hard for a third party app to make an algorithm that works consistently in all situations. The OS could decide to send the updated location when it’s just outside of the range at which the app’s algorithm defines it’s home, and then then only send another update half an hour later, or not at all. As a developer, the only thing you could do is widen or narrow the range, but is just a balancing act, and there’s no one size fits all solution.
In iOS, only the shortcuts app has more rights and is triggered more often with a more accurate location. You can simply make an automation that runs when you arrive at a certain location, or when you leave a certain location and it always runs very fast and accurately within a few meters. There’s no dependency on the state of the Shortcuts app. Automations always runs with the same accuracy no matter if the Shortcuts app is running or not.
