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!