What is currently the best detection for mobile devices?

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Today I upgraded my smartphone to Android 7
Right after that I noticed that it’s (Android 7) extremely frantic on dropping wifi. Something I allready noticed with a brand new Galaxy S7 (but thought it was a Samsung thing, turns out to be a Android thing).
Detecting if someone is at home by pinging the phone is not accurate anymore. Within minutes after turning off the screen the wifi is dropped, ping times out and pimatic changes to “nobody home”.
So it’s time to look at some other detection meganism.

There are a few projects with Android apps and pimatic plugins form detecting the current location, but I’m lost in the forest searching for the best option.
Anyone who can suggest something simple and effective to communicate with pimatic to tell if the device is at home ore not? Tasker as an option is dooable bit I prefer without.

iPhone has the same “problem”. It is done to save energy. My current solution is to still ping the device as I have noticed that the iPhone still connects to the wifi about every 10-15 minutes and is pingable shortly. I figured this is enough for my purpose so I created rules which set the dumy-presence device which indicates that someone is home after the phone is not reachable for 20 minutes.

@koffienl did you set your wifi to keep alive under advanced settings? If you are rooted you could also look into modifying the wifi heartbeat.

@thex
How often do you send a ping? every second?

I use the default values from the Ping devices, should be 5 seconds with two second timeout 4 retries.

best for me is mac in the fritzbox query

https://forum.pimatic.org/topic/2052/fritzbox-wlan-script-someoneathome/16

I use owntracks running on my phone and sending it’s position to an mqtt broker and read by pimatic. This way I can also define multiple positions (e.g. ‘at work’,…) to invoke special rules. Owntracks does not need very much battery when in background, as it also uses wifi/cell towers/… to save battery

@Anduril said in What is currently the best detection for mobile devices?:

I use owntracks running on my phone and sending it’s position to an mqtt broker and read by pimatic. This way I can also define multiple positions (e.g. ‘at work’,…) to invoke special rules. Owntracks does not need very much battery when in background, as it also uses wifi/cell towers/… to save battery

Currently testing with it, thanks. Looks promising