'When I leave home' started triggering regularly whilst I’m at home

appleinsideruser

Since yesterday morning my iPhone 12 Pro (iOS 14.8) has started triggering my When I Leave Home and When I Arrive Home automations saying I have left home and then returned ≈ 0–100 seconds later. It does this repeatedly and irregularly about every 3–100 minutes. These unwanted automations get slightly entertaining!

Last evening, I updated to iOS 15 and it suspended the false reports for a while. However, my bedroom lights woke me up at 6:17 and 6:29 this morning. Putting my phone in Airplane mode solved it (letting me get back to sleep), but is a bit of a price to pay! I want my automations back.

Any thoughts anyone?

P.S. I have a log of all these events as I run homebridge, but I have disabled homebridge and can confirm that this issue persists when homebridge is not running. No other phones are registered in Home so others can’t be pranking me. I have used the same automations for months without changes or problems.

kingofsomewherehot

I don't use this stuff... so I've never looked into how they work... but...

What causes the system to know that you've left or arrived?... does it do this via GPS information?... or does it just detect whether you're on your home WiFi or off your home WiFi network?  (If the latter, it could possibly be traced to the stability of your WiFi system and your phone staying connected.)

You asked for "any thoughts"  ... that's one that I had.

appleinsideruser

I appreciate your thoughts @kingofsomewherehot. Yes, the system uses Geofencing on your selected iOS device. This in turn uses a combo of Wi-Fi (to detect when I leave without using much GPS power) plus I assume perhaps a check of GPS to see that I really went. 

I haven’t had any Wi-Fi symptoms, but have just rebooted it. It’s a great idea! 😊 

I waited before posting back to get a hint as to if that fixed it... and... it’s now 15 minutes since the last ‘away’ event. (I had had 6 in the last half hour prior to that). So a provisional big thank you (although sometimes there’s a gap of an hour or more). I can’t believe I didn’t consider Wi-Fi. 🤦
🤞😃

appleinsideruser

Well, I spoke to soon! The issue recurred then again after another Wi-Fi reboot.

My iPhone does need to be connected to the home Wi-Fi for the problem to occur, it doesn’t happen it it’s on 3G.

But it doesn’t seem to be related to a problem with the Wi-Fi. Interestingly I have not seen the rogue Away issue whilst running continuous pings from my adjacent iMac (on the same Wi-Fi) and from a ping app on the iPhone. But there seems to be some unexpected/unknown outside influence. But that could be chance during the hour I tested that.

I had to keep the screen awake for that last test. Then I just left the iPhone idle and awake and all was well for another hour. Then I put the iPhone to sleep and my Away actions triggered quite quickly. Then I left it awake and all was well again for another hour now! So, on Wi-Fi and asleep seems essential for the glitch...

This is so odd recently after being great for a year or more.

Any other thoughts? 🤷

appleinsideruser

Quick update for future travellers: 

Did an “iTunes/Finder” Restore Backup... (just restoring contacts etc.) and the problem hasn’t recurred for a couple of days — I’ve probably just jinxed it by posting this!