Is device presence sensor reliable ?

[lk96]

How is presence detected to start with? based on network activity? DHCP ?

I noticed that my Android phone tends to be detected when is at home (or away) more reliable but not always.

My wife's iphone6 is a total hit or miss. When it's detected to be away, it may be declared so about 10min later. Some times its presence is not
detected at all when its back.

I experimented a bit with the inactivity grace period but from what I read this is only intended to assist with the case where
some devices may cut off wifi when it's used for phone calls ().

Any comments or suggestions?

[Fire69]

Working great here with several Android phones.
I think I read somewhere that iPhones cut the wifi when the screen's off, so it's not connected to your network anymore => set as inactive on A+

[lk96]

Thanks to Fire69 for the feedback. I took some time to monitor further.
I still see two issues:

1. It seems that the Almond app on Android resets by itself the "notify me" setting I chose for a given device after a while (the "while" here is a day or so).
So I would get notifications for the configured devices for a bit and then suddenly nothing till I noticed that the setting was "lost" in the app.

2. I still see two "device left"  back to back messages for the presence of a device without a "join" in between. That for sure doesn't look right to me.

I'm running the latest (R89) firmware. And latest Android app available.

[lk96]

BTW, I have the Almond Android app open on two different devices. Is it possible that Almond doesn't support such a scenario and in that case
delivery of all notification to all devices is not guaranteed?

[fillibar]

If you compare the notifications listed in the 2, does it look like they are overlapping (same shown) or interfering (one gets some, the other gets some) with each other?

I have used it with Android phones (only) without any trouble at all to set home and away modes. I use it with Amazon Dash buttons as triggers also. Usually that has been pretty good although sometimes the buttons are not recognized as wireless properly.

[lk96]

good question. Unfortunately I  can't check any more because I uninstalled the app on one of the phone.

I recollect though seeing that the vast majority of notifications were present on both phones and there was an occasional missing (or extra depending on where you look at).

I very clearly recall seeing back to back "left" messages for my wife's iphone6.

And I also very clearly recall seeing on my Android, 3 back to back "rejoined".

One case that I did check I found the "missing" message on the other phone.

Thus the speculation on whether things got confused because of the use of 2 phones.

Note though I also experienced the issue where i'd set the device presence notifications to "always" only to find a day or two later that it was reversed by itself back to "never".

For now I'll be monitoring the situation to determine if it was caused by running the app on both devices.

[lk96]

so it happened again. This time I've been running the Almond Android app only on a single phone.

Noticed that I wasn't seeing any notifications for couple days. Decided to check and found that the "notify me" setting was reverted back to "never" on its own.

[mparadis]

I would uninstall and reinstall the apps. Seems like something funky. I haven't had this issue once using numerous devices and it seems strange that it is happening.