I recently switched from a commercial solution to OpenWRT. I also use home assistant to manage lights etc in my home. All family members use iPhones.
Ever since switching to OpenWRT, location info for people at home has become unreliable. Right now my wife’s and daughter’s phones think they are about 1km from home, even though they are right at home. Our home is such that GPS signals probably can’t reach them in the home office and bedroom level, which are actually in the basement.
My setup has one main router and several dumb AP’s.
Has anyone experienced this issue, and more importantly, resolved it?
Any new router has new MAC addresses, which are used to assist geolocationing, so even if you had bought another model of your previous/ commercial router and replaced yours with that, you'd see exactly the same behaviour. Both Android- and iOS based devices will learn about new devices (new MAC addresses) in the neighbourhood constantly, via your own-, your neighbours- and the devices of random blokes passing by, how long it will take until those new MAC addresses are considered valid at your location entirely depends on Apple/ Google and their algorithms.
If you had bought a used device, the confusion would be even worse, as you might be located in an entirely different city/ state for quite a while to come. This is not an issue caused by OpenWrt and can't be influenced by OpenWrt in any way. The only option is waiting, with GPS activated (and ideally getting a lock).
Thanks, I was hoping there was a quicker solution, like an add-on that would allow setting GPS coordinates or something. I’ll just have to be more patient. I’ll try putting a phone on the windowsill overnight to see if that helps.
There is no such thing, Apple/ Google only rely on their own mapping cars and Android/ iOS devices for this. They don't trust Joe Sixpack to enter coordinates, both because most people can't enter them correctly (don't know the values, nor the format, and would be too lazy to enter or update (after moving) them anyways) and because many would deliberately set 'funny' locations (Antarctica, North Pole, Pentagon, etc.). And your router itself has no idea where it is located, beyond the country (used to follow regulatory requirements).
Yes, vendors 'expected' every wireless device to come with GPS 'really soon' 15 years ago already, while that has happened for smartphones, it has not for notebooks, routers, TVs, printers and other wireless devices. Because it's just too expensive (heck, even one buck for a battery backed RTC is too expensive for most vendors), would draw too much power (batteries) and because many indoor devices -routers in particular- could never obtain a successful GPS lock anyways.