How do you make Android HSTouch connection to the HomeSeer Server reliable????

[brianbthompson]

I have been dealing with this issue for years now and have never been able to find a good solution to it.

My Android HSTouch clients often drop their connections to the HSTouch Server. After this happens it is difficult if not impossible to get the HSTouch client reconnected and working again without killing the app. Here are some of the reasons my HSTouch clients disconnect:
1. The phone sits for a while
2. I move from one room to another and the wifi connection switches to another access point
3. I move out of range of Wifi and the phone switches to a cellular based IP connection

All of these things cause the HSTouch application to stop working. Here are the various symptoms you see in the HSTouch application when it loses the server connection. Here is a list:
1. The HSTouch application hangs.
When this happens, the behavior is different depending on the type of phone the application is running on. Here are the various behaviors I have observed when the HSTouch application hangs:
a. The application freezes until it is killed using the Android application manager or until the phone is rebooted. A very unpleasant behavior.
b. The application freezes until the Android hung application timer expires. In this case, Android asks if you want to restart the application. A less unpleasant behavior.
2. The HSTouch application acts normally until it needs to interact with the HSTouch Server. Then it hangs.
Look at #1 above for behavior once the application hangs.
3. The HSTouch application acts normally but does not display HomeSeer device status correctly and does not send events to the HomeSeer server
This is an interesting failure mode. The HSTouch application seems to operate properly but is in fact disconnected from the HomeSeer Server. You are now in an alternate reality until HSTouch reconnects to the HomeSeer Server.

I have a UI widget with the Android display options menu but many of the failure modes I described above make this work around useless.

Is it only me having these types of problems or are other people having these types of problems as well??? If so, what are people doing to deal with this issue???

Thanks for any information you can provide....

[grtaylor]

I run HS Touch on two Lenovo Android tabs and 3 Raspberry Pi's - and none of them have connection issues at all. They stay connected for weeks at a time - so I would suggest trying a different device and/or a different WiFi AP. I use UniFi AP's from Ubiquiti.

[Guest]

I have found two things that helped my tablet reliability:

1. Assign the phone/tablet a fixed IP address (on your local WIFI LAN). The easiest way to accomplish this is to use IP reservation (using the MAC address of the phone/tablet). This is done with your router's software. Check your router's documentation to see how it is done on your router.

2. Turn off battery optimization for the HS Touch application on the phone/tablet.

I will still occasionaly loose connectivity, but after doing the above, the frequency of it happening is greatly reduced.

[brianbthompson]

I have found two things that helped my tablet reliability:

1. Assign the phone/tablet a fixed IP address (on your local WIFI LAN). The easiest way to accomplish this is to use IP reservation (using the MAC address of the phone/tablet). This is done with your router's software. Check your router's documentation to see how it is done on your router.

2. Turn off battery optimization for the HS Touch application on the phone/tablet.

I will still occasionaly loose connectivity, but after doing the above, the frequency of it happening is greatly reduced.

Thanks greatly for the info.

I just turned battery optimization off for HSTouch on my Samsung S7 and I still have the same problem.

If I leave the S7 sit for about 2 minutes, there seems to be some type of timeout which occurs between the HSTouch client and the server. The HSTouch app displays the message "Not Connected" at the bottom of the screen. To get it to reconnect, I either have to wait for the HSTouch connection retry logic to kick in (between 30 seconds and 1 minute) or I have to reconnect manually using the Android display options UI widget.

I just tried turning all battery optimizations for the S7 and it still does the same thing.

I also have a Motorola Nexus 6 and it is acting much better now that I turned off battery optimizations for HSTouch.

Now I have gone into the "Medium Power Saving Mode" screen on my Samsung S7 and turned on "Background network usage". This option allows Android apps running in the background to use Wifi and mobile data. Looks like this option is specific to Samsung phones. Now that I have done this, HSTouch on the Samsung phone is acting much better.

OK. So it looks like many power management features are specific to the manufacturers device. Now that I found the magic incantations for Samsung, it looks like many of the connection problems are solved.

Thanks for the great info.

[Guest]

Your welcome. On some Samsung devices there is an option called "Keep WIFI on during sleep". On my Note8 phone, its in the Advanced portion of the Wifi configuration page. Might check that.