this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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Best way to trigger automation with my return home? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 3 weeks ago by Lemmee@sh.itjust.works to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world
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I have a few old automations that are designed to unlock my front door, or open my garage door, depending on how I leave. If I ride my bike or car, it opens my garage, if I leave via front door, it opens the front door. Pretty simple. Except!!! I did this in pieces, so it's 2 separate automations. One detects my phone entering the "home zone", the other detects an event firing (iOS triggered the event via 'shortcuts')

There is now "zone based" automations, and there is also my "person entity". So the way I see it, I have 3 different ways to tell when I come home:

  1. My phone's gps enters the 'home zone'

  2. My HA 'person' state changes from 'away' to 'home'

  3. My phone's shortcut app fires an event that is detected.

I feel like #1 and #2 are the same, no? I only have one device linked to my person entity, and it's my phone. Is there any difference in this case? Is there a preferred choice?

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[–] Lemmee@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Ooh. That’s a great point.

I just did some digging and it seems something is wrong with my phone or person detection because it don’t notice that I left for the gym this morning.

I guess that needs troubleshooting as well. Maybe having multiple triggers increases the robustness of the automation?

[–] dono@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

If you use background location, or even just the geofencing in the location settings of the Homeassistant App then it wont work if you have Network location disabled in Android. After some research i found out that in newer versions of Android it wont use gps at all for background location. This tripped me up for some time since (i think) Grapheneos has this disabled by default (or i disabled it idk). After enabeling this again everything worked reliably.

[–] Lemmee@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 weeks ago

I'm on iOS, and I've got 'always on' enabled for location services. It has worked pretty much flawlessly until this weekend, so I'm guessing something got borked, and I need to do some updating in some places.