HomeKit Am I home or away if I have location services disabled

[adad11]

If I'm only signed into an iPad and registered to a home and have location services turned off, will automations work when the "People" setting is set to nobody is home?

I have my iPhone, my wife's iPhone and my daughter's iPad registered to my home. My daughter's iPad never leaves the house and has location services turned off. I've made an automation to turn the lights on if "nobody is home" at a certain time but it doesn't seem to work. What's annoying is, in Homekit, I can't see who it thinks is "home" or "away" so I can't diagnose where the problematic device is, which is why I thought I'd ask if anyone knows how "People" status automations work when one person has location services are turned off.

 

[sclawis300]

I believe it pulls the last known location. So possibly wherever it was when location services were turned off. Also, if you are on the same WiFi network then I would assume it knows you are home.

 

[Itinj24]

You can set the automations to work so that it only uses one or two or however many people. In other words, whether your daughters iPad has location on or off, you can exclude it from the automation.

I have a wall mounted iPad with a generic iCloud account that I use as a central HomeKit device. It’s been invited to the HomeKit setup and I exclude this from the automations and the people based automations work great. For good measures, I disabled the location services for HomeKit under Privacy in the settings and have keychain turned off. Also if you go to Find My in the iPad settings, there’s another toggle there for “Share My Location” which mentions the Home App which I also have turned off.

As for knowing who’s home with the Home app (a feature I really missed from the Samsung Smartthings app), I bought a few Wemo Mini smart plugs and placed them in areas where the outlets aren’t used. I have automations set up that when a certain person arrives, it turns their assigned plug on and if they leave, it turns it off. I then set up a room called “Presence Switches” containing these plugs which I can quickly refer to and utilize in automations as a workaround for those secure automations that require user intervention. For example, “When Jon’s Presence Switch is turned on, and I am home, open Jon’s garage door, unlock the front door and disable the alarm”