Geofencing feature is unreliable and feels like a beta version

[brawlingsaz]

I have three Ultra cameras outside, plus a doorbell camera and two baby cameras watching my home egress doors and the rooms they open into inside the house.

The doorbell and baby cameras are all directly on their own Wi-Fi links, and the three Ultra cameras sync with the base unit which is directly connected to the internet router via a CAT5 cable, per the setup instructions.

This all works great, and live camera views and motion captures and alerts can be seen via the app, with the minor issue of occasional "your device does not appear to be connected" messages and blank/black screens on occasion (which always solves itself in short order, 60-120 seconds or so).

My android phone is the primary and my wife's iPhone is the guest/secondary phone in the app. After an initial problem with my app during setup (resolved with the help desk - turns out that phone names need to be simple, without any special characters), everything works as expected, except that the geofencing feature is fragile and buggy. I would have thought that it was the beta release of geofencing, but there are forum posts and complaints from 2017 and onwards about geofencing, so... This feature is years old, why on earth is it still barely working and fraught with problems?

Oddly, it works pretty well with my android phone, although settings such as "push notifications" change by themselves, as though closing or restarting the app resets them to the default settings (seriously irritating, please fix this).

But my wife's iPhone doesn't seem to ever stay functional with the geofencing feature. If I leave, suddenly we are inundated with motion alerts because her phone status is "offline" instead of either Home or Away. She has to fiddle with the app and and I have to 'uncheck' and 'check' her phone in my "primary app" and then suddenly she is seen to be "home" and the alerts stop... Till the next time this happens, days or weeks later.

The latest issue was a few days ago when we left the state but the geofencing feature shows her as still at home, so monitoring never turned on. I had to manually switch all modes to "monitoring" in my app. And I'll have to manually correct it all back when we get home.

It will work OK again for days or weeks, but I know it will all go to hell again soon and require intervention. Please fix this "fragility problem" to let us just use and enjoy the Arlo products and app.