I’m having an issue where my wife’s iPhone knows when it leaves the geofence, but it doesn’t seem to know that my iPhone is at home within the geofence. This causes spurious text messages stating “The alarm was not armed when (wife’s) phone left the geofence.” The problem is always with my phone and not hers.
I can sometimes get the problem to disappear by bringing up the app on my phone, turning off the geofence, waiting several minutes and turning the phone on again. Even if this works, within the next few days the problem reappears.
When I turn the geofence off in my iPhone app, I go into the app on my laptop and note that it greys out my iPhone when I view the edit screen for the notification rule. Then it un-greys it when I turn the geofence back on. So it seems to be communicating with the app; apparently it just thinks I’m outside the geofence at the time.
Note that Geo-services triggers based on movement of the phone by cell-tower triangulation, not GPS. This means that ADC cannot check to see if your device is within the fence, they can only be notified when your device crosses the fence. Some factors can affect reliability. Check the following when you are setting your Geofence and troubleshooting:
– Low power mode on the phone may hinder geoservices.
– Carriers often disable data when voice is active. This is a big one, ff you are on the phone while leaving/entering the fence, it may not register depending on the carrier.
If a destination is near the edge of the fence there can be issues.
– If the Alarm.com app had not been opened since the phone was rebooted, geoservices may not have been active.
Thank you Jason. So I should never close the app on my phone while geoservices are active, correct? And if my phone is out of sync with my actual location, does this mean that it will not fix itself until the next time I cross the geofence? If I reboot my phone and reload the app, will it default to its last known location (in or out of the fence)?
Here’s the biggest difference between my wife’s phone and mine. Her carrier is Verizon and mine is AT&T. She gets decent reception in our house, and I do not. So I installed one of those virtual signal towers that allows me to get cell reception through the internet inside our home. Can that confuse geoservices, or are they designed to handle this?
Ultimately what I’m trying to decide is whether or not to just switch to her Verizon plan and see if the problem goes away. But I wouldn’t be considering a switch otherwise, and if it doesn’t resolve the issue, I’ll be really bummed!
In this case, the issues you can run into with Geoservices are more to do with how the phone is used. Using a cell network extender for your phone locally shouldn’t cause disruption that I am aware.
Note that the phone’s location is not being constantly tracked, only when it leaves/enters across the fence line.
The direction of the phone’s travel is triangulated and when you cross, the rule kicks in. Geoservices will assume the phone’s last known state. If you cross out of the fence and when crossing back in something disrupts the ability for the phone to report crossing the fence, the phone will be assumed outside the fence.
I do occasionally unload my app and so maybe that’s the problem. Otherwise I don’t know how I’d be using the phone differently than my wife does. (Actually, she occasionally closes ALL the apps on her phone, yet strangely the problem affects my phone, not hers.)
I should be able to use cell data while on a phone call: I have an iPhone 8 Plus which supports it on a GSM network (e.g. AT&T).
I guess a weak signal at the point where I cross the geofence could also cause an issue, correct? It sounds like it needs a connection to multiple cell towers in order to triangulate a position. Since A&T and Verizon use different towers, I guess that’s one way it could be an issue. When I look at opensignal.com where I cross the geofence, the AT&T signal doesn’t look bad but Verizon is cleaner. I just turned on cellular data roaming in case that makes a difference.
I may have found a big OOPS on my phone: I had specifically turned cellular data OFF in iPhone settings for the alarm.com app!
I had to think about the implications of this: When I was at home doing all my testing, I was connected to wi-fi and it could detect when I was turning geoservices on and off. But when I was actually crossing the geofence, it had no access to the internet at all!
