Apple Watch Alarm Automations - An Easy(ish) Fix

As someone who uses iOS’s sleep tracking and alarm, and who tends to snooze / turn off alarms from my watch, I got frustrated that the iOS Automations function wouldn’t work from the watch; if you set up an automation to run “when you stop / snooze your alarm” in iOS, it works fine if you turn it off from your phone, but the watch did nothing (I assume because the watch doesn’t have a full Home Assistant app and couldn’t execute the command.)

The solution is a little silly, but also a lot easier to set up than some of the more advanced templating techniques I’ve seen:

  1. Set up a button helper in Home Assistant (I called mine “Morning Alarm”)

  2. Set an automation in Home Assistant to run your morning routine when the button is pressed.

  3. Expose the Button to HomeKit so it shows up in the iOS Home App.

  4. In iOS, set up an automation to press the button when you turn off / snooze your alarm.

It’s a little conviluded still, but it does the trick if you want your morning routines to run through HA!

(One note: when you expose the “button” to Homekit, it technically shows up as a switch in the iOS Home App. When you press it, the switch turns on for a few seconds before automatically switching back off.)

Hope this makes life simplier for some folks!

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