What is current best practice for iOS home/away detect?

Is there a consensus on current best practice for home/away detection based on iOS devices?

Currently, this is what I am doing:
(1) Each family member's iPhone is setup to send email to the home when leaving or arriving. This is setup in FindMy app on each iOS device. (notifications about you -> When I leave, and when I arrive)
(2) I use Email+ to receive these emails and process a regex on the subject to detect who has arrived or left.
(3) I adjust each persons home/away state in an indigo variable triggered by (2)
(4) I trigger various things when these variables change.

I have been doing this for a couple years. It has worked ok. Some reliability issues for sure. I have not tried to go super deep into root causes, but my sense is there are at least two sources of unreliability:
(1) FindMy doesn't always seem to trigger and/or send its email notifications on some devices and/or sometimes iCloud wants re-authentication or has some other excuse for not triggering or sending notifications or perhaps is latent in sending its notification.
(2) Email+ doesn't always process incoming emails timely or some other issue with incoming emails. I am using a gmail account, IMAP with IDLE. Just looking at some other forum posts, it looks like this is a known issue with gmail now? So, I guess I should switch the home to an iCloud account?


Zooming back out, what are others doing?
What else should I consider doing here to tweak the above setup for high reliability and low latency?
Another approach altogether? (i.e. I do have a synology router, so perhaps detecting iOS devices connected to the router?)

Looking forward to hearing about others experiences and solutions!

Maybe something like Locative with the GeoFence plugin?

I use the Home Remote app. Set up a geofence and have the app operate a virtual switch in Indigo when you leave or enter. It’s worked well for me for several years; just had to modify the commands it sends to Indigo following the recent remote access changes.

Virtual devices for each person that are published to HomeKit with HLS and then switched on or off as people come home or leave via HomeKit automations. Pretty rock solid now.

I use the Home Remote app.

Ditto. I've found it to be very reliable.

The Home Remote app hasn't been updated in quite some time and I'd suspect it'll be culled by Apple at some point for lack of development. I'd recommend folks with iOS devices download it even if only to have it in reserve.

Apple Shortcuts also work well, but each traversing of the fence requires affirmation (no automatic fences are allowed).

I use the Life360 plugin and the service

I use a combination of device presence on my network as reported by the UniFi plugin, and the FindFriendsMini plugin.

Maybe something like Locative with the GeoFence plugin?

I’ll second that! Works well on two separate properties, each with their own separate Indigo systems.


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80% of the apps I have on my phone ask permission to use Location services on the iPhone. I would love Indigo Touch to provide this natively.

80% of the apps I have on my phone ask permission to use Location services on the iPhone. I would love Indigo Touch to provide this natively.

Unfortunately with Apple Shortcuts, it asks for permission every time the shortcut is run (for location-based shortcuts and a few others as well).

80% of the apps I have on my phone ask permission to use Location services on the iPhone. I would love Indigo Touch to provide this natively.

Unfortunately with Apple Shortcuts, it asks for permission every time the shortcut is run (for location-based shortcuts and a few others as well).

But if you create a virtual device for each person in indigo and publish it to HomeKit you can switch it on and off without being asked for permission . It works just like a light that switches on when you get home. And you can then use that to trigger Indigo actions. And in fact you could also get Indigo to run a shortcut.

But if you create a virtual device for each person in indigo and publish it to HomeKit you can switch it on and off without being asked for permission . It works just like a light that switches on when you get home. And you can then use that to trigger Indigo actions. And in fact you could also get Indigo to run a shortcut.

In this case, I was just talking about using Geofences in the Shortcuts app. You can't use location-based triggers in the Shortcuts app without express confirmation each time. Other than that, they work very well. There's a few other things that Apple has locked down in Shortcuts that require an affirmative response before they'll run.

Yes. But geolocation automations (for being at home or not) in the Home app don’t suffer from that. Hence my post. But I may be misunderstanding what you’re after!

Yes. But geolocation automations (for being at home or not) in the Home app don’t suffer from that. Hence my post. But I may be misunderstanding what you’re after!

I appreciate that. I'm not the OP; I was just responding to the thread--like you!

80% of the apps I have on my phone ask permission to use Location services on the iPhone. I would love Indigo Touch to provide this natively.

Unfortunately with Apple Shortcuts, it asks for permission every time the shortcut is run (for location-based shortcuts and a few others as well).

I would expect Indigo to have a lat long for each device (sent from Indigo Touch just like DomoPad does) without using shortcuts at all.