I've been doing extensive research over the last few days on home/away detection now that Nest integration is coming / has come to an end (depending on your legacy status). Non-single dwellings comprise the vast, vast number of residences in the world, and without the ability to determine when the last person left, the SmartAway part of the system is significantly less useful (and in some cases, downright annoying). I've found this raised in a thread in 2016 when the feature was first launched, with a comment that "it's been passed along to the developers and added to the roadmap".
Nest was a great, pragmatic solution to the issue... but as is the risk when relying on a third-party to provide your answer... isn't the answer anymore and we need another, ideally Lutron-owned solution.
Lutron team - I know that there are a lot of pulls on your time, everything is a mess today with COVID-19, and residential solutions likely aren't the engine of your business. But please, please can this be moved up the app development team's priority list? I'm entirely ignorant to the software / hardware engineering challenges there are to pull this off, so am in no way dismissive of these... but others (e.g. Nest!) have been able to figure out a way to do this, so it is clearly technologically feasible.
In the meantime, there are some ways around most of the limitations via IFTTT and using Life360. THANK YOU for making a IFTTT connection. But it does not allow addressing SmartAway. So as an interim solution, please could we either:
- Get SmartAway added as an action within IFTTT - this will allow us to solve the problem... although then relies on 2 services to do this, but should at least solve the problem.
- Add some other reputable service as an alternative for home/away detection in the Lutron app - suspect this is much harder.
Thank you for a terrific product. Let's please put this nearly 5 year old issue to bed!