I recently stumbled upon the Proximity integration of Home Assistant as well as Traccar to track your devices. Until now, I used the iCloud3 v3 component to do such things. Time to compare them.
Proximity
The proximity integration is builtin within Home Assistant and works with its zones and any available tracking entity that’s already part of Home Assistant. In my case, I use my person, which uses my iPhone via the companion app to track my location. For each zone, you can create a new proximity integration and track different devices or persons.
Each integration then comes with different sensors to work with:
- Direction of travel of each defined device
- Direction of travel of the nearest defined device
- Distance of each defined device
- Distance of the nearest defined device
- Nearest device
- Nearest distance
With this, you can always check, whether one or a specific device is within a zone, in which distance and whether it’s traveling away or towards the zone or whether it’s stationary.
iCloud3 v3
When I started using Home Assistant, either the proximity was not yet available or I just didn’t find it. Since all my devices are iCloud devices anyway, it was a nice way to get proximity information for my iPhone, but also for my MacBook and Apple Watch. It also works with zones, but even more strict than the Home Assistant Proximity integration.
One caveat though is that you need to login via your iCloud credentials. So you have to trust the author of the integration. Additionally, since the login mechanism is reverse-engineered and may change from time to time, because Apple does Apple things, it may not work all the time.
If it works, you’ll get many entities, though. I ignore the device related entities here (e.g. battery or last update) and focus on the proximity entities:
- Arrival time estimation for the home zone
- Zone direction (inHomeZone, inZone (any different defined zone), AwayFrom and Towards)
- Distance from home zone
- Moved distance between the last two updates
- Current zone
- Travel time between the last two updates
An advantage is that it doesn’t need to be configured for each zone individually, it just uses all available zones. But it’s also a hassle to configure and maintain it.
Traccar
The latest integration I found was Traccar, which describes itself as “Modern GPS Tracking Platform”. Since it’s Open Source, you can host it yourself so that your data does not leave you (at least as long as your server is secured).
Here, you’re also using zones, but need to define those zones within Traccar itself, but you can be much more granular with the line or polygon tool and are not limited to circles.
The integration then comes with the following new (proximity) entities for each device connected with Traccar:
- Address (which never worked for me, even though it worked in Traccar itself)
- Movement (stopped or moving)
- Geofence (zone)
- Speed
- Current Home Assistant zone
As you can already see, unfortunately, there is no sensor to detect whether you’re approaching a zone or not. It’s either in a specific zone or in an “unknown” zone.
Comparison
There are many ways to compare these integrations. For me, it was important to trigger automations when I come home from work.
Sensors
For me, Home Assistant Proximity gives me the best when it comes to sensors. You not only get sensors for each device you’re tracking, you also get the nearest one and whether at least one is still in a zone, which can make automations easier when checking if anyone is in a zone.
While you can achieve the same with iCloud3, you need to check each device individually.
In Traccar, you don’t get any information about the distance or whether a device increases or decreases its distance to a zone. The speed is not helpful here, either (and for me, it always displays knots instead of km/h, even though I changes this on my device).
Accuracy
When using Traccar with the highest accuracy, it tracks even more than I expected. And it doesn’t care how I set other settings, when visiting Traccar itself, it tracks every few seconds. At least, as soon as it detects a movement, which can take several hundred meters until it does. But then, it’s insanely accurate.
As soon as I lower the accuracy to “high”, it only tracks once every 15 – 20 minutes for me, which is way too inaccurate. And it doesn’t care about any other interval, tolerance or heartbeat setting.
And while you cannot see the exact amount of data points Home Assistant Proximity collects, for me, the distance changes occur between every 2 and 7 minutes, depending on travel speed and defined tolerance.
For iCloud3, the update value is every 10 minutes. So less frequent, but still accurate.
Battery
The iCloud3 integration does not need any additional battery life of your device, since this data is shared to your iCloud account anyways.
For Home Assistant and Traccar, it depends on how often you leave a zone. Home Assistant takes around 5 % on a busy day, while Traccar can take 15 – 20 % for the same amount of time. This comes from the high frequency of tracking every few seconds. And despite I set the distance being tracked to 50 meters and the interval to 300 seconds, it always tracked every few seconds with the highest accuracy, where it only tracked a few times within a 30 minutes walk with the accuracy set to “high” and thus take way less battery energy.
Supported devices
iCloud3 can be used with all of your iCloud devices, even AirPods (when they are nearby another device with actual GPS), no additional app needed.
Home Assistant Proximity needs any type of tracking entity. In theory, there can be many supported devices. In reality, it often comes down to devices with the companion app.
Traccar must be used with its client app for Android or iOS to be usable.
Pros and Cons
Pros: Home Assistant Proximity
- Best sensors to work with
- Privacy friendly
- Easy to configure and to work with
- Completely self-hostable
Cons: Home Assistant Proximity
- No actual GPS data available
- Interval not configurable
Pros: iCloud3
- No additional software required
Cons: iCloud3
- May work or may not work, if Apple changed something
- Setup and configuration is somewhat tedious
- Actual iCloud credentials required
- Supports only Apple devices
- Limited to five connected devices
- Dependency on big tech
Pros: Traccar
- Completely self-hostable
- All tracking points can be played on a map to check the exact way you moved
Cons: Traccar
- Very high battery usage
- Either highly accurate or highly inaccurate
- Needs some time to recognize leaving a zone to start tracking
Conclusion
I guess I will kill iCloud3 for me, since I get nearly everything I need from the builtin Proximity integration without the hassle of a system that can break anytime. This is no explicit no against iCloud3 and I appreciate that work that’s been taken to get it working again every time. But it also requires an external service and thus is dependent on big tech.
For Traccar, the missing sensors for relative directions towards/away from a zone and the distance to a zone is a show-stopper for me. The – for me – non-working settings to lower the tracking frequency a bit to keep battery usage low does not help either.
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