| Important: The steps in this article have been updated to reflect app version 8.2.0 or higher. Please update your app today for the best Canary experience. | |
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Geofencing is a feature that we at Canary are constantly working to improve, but there may be actions you can take to help improve the accuracy of geofencing.
You need to have your phone with you for Canary to automatically detect whether you’re home or away. So if you forget your phone at home, your Canary will think you’re still there, and it won’t turn on or off automatically. If you signed in to a tablet that never leaves home using the same email address, the system will think you are home and never automatically arm if you leave.
Note: To learn more, visit About Automatic Arm/Disarm.
Enable Wi-Fi, wireless services and location services
First and foremost, please make sure that you've permitted the Canary app to access your current location, but for an optimal experience:
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Check to see if your phone has a strong cellular signal in your home. If you receive better reception with either regular 5G, 4G or 4G LTE, please enable the cellular service with the greatest reception. Note: Depending on your location, Cellular Data may be called Mobile Data or Wireless Data.
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Always keep Wi-Fi on. When you're home and when you're out and about, enabling Wi-Fi helps your phone's GPS determine your current location and is required for geofencing to work properly.
- The Canary app will not be able to detect your location at all if location services are disabled on your device. Location services need to be on and set to ‘Always Allow'. During initial setup of your location, if you selected ‘Only While Using the App’ when prompted to allow the Canary app access to your location then geofencing will only work when the app is open.
Check mobile device settings
Even if you granted the Canary app permission to access your location during initial setup, there may be other settings that are impairing Canary’s ability to properly detect your location. These settings are very important since many may affect how location services work in the background of the Canary app.
Check your phone’s location settings for iOS or Android.
Open the Canary app
If Canary can't determine your current location accurately, fails to arm or fails to disarm properly, please try opening the Canary app. When opening the Canary app it will always check your location and automatically update to your correct mode.
If the correct mode still has not changed please try the following actions:
- Force close the Canary app
- Log out and back into the Canary app
Check that your home's location is correct in the Canary App.
The Canary app will automatically set your device location when you first setup your Canary. However, if the center of the Geofence is slightly off or if you have moved since initially setting up your location, it would affect Auto-Mode Switching accuracy. You can verify that your geofence is correct and the position is properly centered by using the following steps while you are at the location where you are having issues:
- Open the Canary app.
- Tap the gear icon in the top right corner of the screen.
- Tap My location.
- Tap Geofence preferences.
- Tap Edit position.
- Tap the green arrow on the map.
- Verify placement and tap Save Position.
Adjust size of geofence
Adjusting the size of your geofence to ‘large’ can help with troubleshooting. This is essentially editing the perimeter around your location that is used to know when location members are home or away. The default Small size (150 meters) is most accurate, increasing the size to Medium (300 meters) or Large (450 meters) can help with troubleshooting Home or Away detection.
- Open the Canary app.
- Tap the gear icon in the top right corner of the screen.
- Tap My location.
- Tap Geofence preferences.
- Tap Edit geofence.
- Tap Edit size.
- Tap on Small, Medium or Large.
- Tap Save Size.
- Tap Save Changes.
Check that you don't have more than one location with the same address.
We understand that many of our customers have devices across multiple locations and sometimes these may even be at the same address. This can affect auto-mode switching and interfere with determining the accuracy of your location. If you wish to use Auto-mode switching make sure that you don't have more than one location with the same geofence / address.
Have you installed the Canary app on more than one device with a single Canary account?
In addition to using Canary with a phone, we understand that many of our customers like to install the Canary app on more than one device (e.g. tablet or iPad). However, this can interfere with determining your accurate location if these other devices do not leave your home as frequently as you do with your phone.
For the best experience, we recommend that you log into your account on only one device at any given time.
Note: Geofencing is turned off by default on tablets.
Have you logged into the Canary app on one of your members mobile devices?
Don’t let other people use your email and password to sign into the Canary app. This can interfere with determining the accuracy of your location or cause Automatic Arm/Disarm issue for your location members account. Each user should have their own account to log in. There is no additional cost for users.
Note: To learn more about adding members please see Member settings