Edit:
Yeah, the geofence isn't working at all. Just noticed when i got home it's been switching on and off half a dozen times within a minute. I definitely haven't moved anywhere near the edges of a 200m radius from my house. I have no idea why it seems to think I can teleport back and forth hundreds of meters instantly, by I know I'm not!
Pixal wrote: ↑Wednesday 20 September 2017 21:56
I liked the geofencing idea very much and it worked perfect with iPhones but since I went to Android it's nothing else but crap. The best possible results I had was by using the apps Tasker and Autolocation, I just created all kinds of situations where Tasker enabled gps. For example, if connecting to car bluetooth? Activate gps location. Disconnect from home wifi? Activate gps location... you catch my drift.
However, still too unreliable. Now I'm using a combination of wifi\bluetooth pings on the raspberry and it seems to be the most reliable for android so far.
I don't get that Google doesn't change the GPS and doze behavior, the future is now, your home should know when you're in the neighborhood, let us choose to drain the battery 3% faster.
This has nothing to do with the app but with the phone and OS used.
Try to explaine a bit
(Iphone has gps chip allways on as it is used for more than only gps if i remember well, andtoid put GPS and WiFI OFF when possible)
All is due to everlasting battery life problems of phones and tablets. the goals geofencing is not considered as something to support yet by phone OS developers, so they make algoritms that in a smart way turn parts of the phone off when they believe it would save battery, including gps.
In most cases gps is turned off when the screen is off. So in you car put it to a charger & run some speedtrap app or navigation app and it will work fine.
Then there are more and more people concerned about privacy and aware of commercial trackers in shops and so on. Yeah they do know you are a recurrent visitor based on your wifi scan for available networks or bluethooth beacon. And OS developers are putted under pressure to make it more difficult to track (devices even get randmized mac adresses in some equipments) Of course turning them off when possible would be the best.
Even with geofence of 5km you will run into this issue if you GPS is turned off by the OS
At night or whenever you device thinks it has been a while since last received location, it wakesup tries to get a new location.
Then there could be a couple of things happening, old location in memory, getting gps fix issues, accuracy issues etc.
All those would be communicated to any app as getting from point A to B. Thus any app might suddenly trigger a geofence.
The bigger the radius the less you geofence is affected.
And then there are mechanisms that get active when battery is below x% and even in a couple of levels. And it will restrict the use of GPS, BT and WIFI, screen brightness even more.
To avoid, make a isalive device to ping your phone (must have static of reserved IP adress!), as soon as you connected your at home, but also here wifi most likely is turned off and only will connect when the screen is on... annoying.
The user must not expect it to be 100% failsafe by only using Geofence of any app, or the geofence must be really wide so the GPS has been on in the travel timeframe.
AGain nothing to do with the app, the app is great, just limited by the hardware and os.
I use isALive ping in domoticz to detect being on the network at home
I use the app. (thanks for developing it , i love it) --> I use the app geofence offcourse
I use Tasker along with the app :
- I use geofence --> that one also fails on geofence a lot if the radius is less then 5km, or is really late with detecting the fence.
I detect car BT connect or not and store with JSON in domoticz (BT uservariable)
I detect WIfi connnect or not and store with JSON in domoticz (wifi uservariable)
i detect Wifi near and store with JSON in domoticz
i detect BT near and store with JSON in domoticz
I get GPS location every 15 minutes and send it to domoticz
Is it failsave ? No...
Is my phone battery dead after approx 5-10h ? Yes..
In my truely believe after a lot of experimenting there is not perfect sollution on this when using your phone as trigger.
I reached upto and above 90% relaiablity with the above, but it will coast a lot of battery life. So many time i take it for granted and switch manual.
Considering the above i would like to have an active part in my house and passive part in my pocket , so "my house" will detect i am home vs me sending I am near home and leave the power consumption at home. But i did not find any suitable hardware.