After you grant permission in the Nest app, Home/Away Assist uses your phone’s location to help tell when you’ve left home and when you’ve returned. The app doesn't constantly track your location. Instead, it only receives basic notifications from your phone that say you’re home or away.
Home/Away Assist uses your Nest products’ activity sensors to tell when you’ve left home and when you’ve returned. If you keep your phone (or tablet) with you throughout the day, Nest can also use its location to help Home/Away Assist more precisely tell when you’ve actually left home and when you’ve come back.
With Home/Away Assist, you don’t have to manually switch all your Nest products on or off or rely on a set schedule. For instance, when you leave your home, Home/Away Assist can turn down your heater to save energy and turn on your Nest camera stream for security.
Learn more about Home/Away Assist
When you sign up for an account in the Nest app, the app asks if you want to use your phone or tablet for Home/Away Assist. You can only choose one device, so pick the one that you take with you most often.
Once you set up Home/Away Assist to use your phone’s location, it uses a combination of cellular and Wi-Fi data from your phone to assess if you’ve left or you’re back home. The Nest app uses the standard location services built into iOS and Android. These services use a combination of cell tower signal strength, Wi-Fi network information, and sometimes GPS to narrow down your location if needed.
To help ensure the best experience with Home/Away Assist, you should at least have cellular data and Wi-Fi enabled in your phone’s settings. When you open the Nest app, it also automatically does a Health Check to let you know whenever changes to your phone’s settings may affect Home/Away Assist accuracy.
Having GPS on can help if your cellular and Wi-Fi connections are weak. The Nest app will only rarely check GPS location. This happens when your cellular and Wi-Fi connections have been lost, and your phone hasn’t checked in in the past couple of days. The use is limited to rare occasions to minimize the impact it has on your phone’s battery charge.
The Nest app doesn’t continually record your phone’s exact location like a GPS navigation app for driving. Home/Away Assist only needs to know whether you’ve left or come back. To do this, the app defines a large area around your home that acts like a home zone.
Your phone isn’t used to determine when exactly you enter your home or when you drive out of the garage. The Nest app only gets a notification from the location services of your phone to determine when you enter or leave your home zone. For instance, if you go to your next door neighbor’s house, your home may not switch to away.
Troubleshooting when Nest can’t tell that you’re home or away
Home/Away Assist can use other people’s phones in exactly the same way as it does yours. Anyone who has access to a Nest home with an account in the app can use their phone’s location to help the home know if someone is there or if everyone is gone. People who have phones that help control your home can check in the Nest app if someone is home or everyone is gone, but they can’t identify exactly who’s home or away.
Learn more about Family Accounts and inviting people to access your Nest home
We take your privacy seriously. Your location information won't be shared outside of Nest without your permission, and we encrypt our connections to keep your data safe.
Like everything else we do, how we use your phone’s location is guided by our privacy principles. We give you the option to use your phone’s location for Home/Away Assist. We also tell you what kind of data is used and how it’s used so you can make an informed decision. And you can disable Home/Away Assist at any time.
For complete details about how we keep your data safe and more, read the Nest Privacy Statement.