I’m at the point where I’ll realize notifications from my Home Control System now via my HomeAssistant integration to our iPhones.
There is one issue I need to deal with:
The critical notifications are absolutely great and exactly what I need for serious issues like power fail, generator operation, fire alert or burgler alert. They even get to us when the iPhones are silent or on DND.
I’ll use a siren as a custom sound for that which really gets our attention.
Unfortunately when we wear our AppleWatches these notifications go to the watch and produce just a “bing” with a little stronger haptic feedback. Especially in louder, busy situations they can get lost beyond other notifications and will not get immediate attention.
I’m not sure if that’s under control of the HA companion software, but is there a way to bypass critical notifications so that they will always be alerted on the iPhone with the loud, long siren tone instead of the Apple Watch?
The only other workaround would be to turn off the notifications for HA in the Apple Watch in general, but in this case no notification would be shown on the watch.
Unless there is a hidden feature that allows you to select a specific endpoint device that’s in the notifications API, the routing of notifications is handled entirely by apple on the phone/watch. the only option is in the watch app on the phone to disable mirroring notifications on the watch.
Not an answer to your question, but something you might want to experiment with to see the possible limits. The Pushover notification system seems to do a pretty good job with iOS critical alerts. I use it with HA, but I cannot speak to the AppleWatch functionality. That said, you can set up a free test notification in about 10 minutes and see what it looks and sounds like:
Pushover blog : iOS Critical Alerts https://blog.pushover.net/posts/2020/2/ios-critical-alerts
App has a free 7-day trial and unlimited usage beyond the trial requires a one-time in-app purchase.
Just wondering if you ever developed a solution to this problem. I am just implementing critical alerts for things like intrusion and in a test, I slept through the ding that the Apple Watch produced. I don’t sleep with my watch so I think that I can just turn off Bluetooth on my phone and that should fix the problem I think. Maybe you found a better solution?
Thanks
This was annoying me too as I kept missing my doorbell and was worried that I wouldn’t be woken if there was a break in.
Work around I just implemented is to use the icloud integration to display a message. It triggers the Find My Phone/Watch sound and message. You can’t change the tone, but it starts quiet and gets really loud. And it keeps going until you dismiss it. And I think your device name must be one word, so if it isn’t, you’ll have to change it.
Also, send Apple feedback saying that they need to imporve the system.
- service: icloud.display_message
data:
account: [email protected]
device_name: WATCH or PHONE NAME
message: Alarm!!!
sound: true
Thanks! This actually works really well. I just use the play_sound service instead of display_message. It does work with multiple words as the device name, but doesn’t seem to like symbols. Spaces are ok.
Only issue with that is if you actually want some notifications to show up on your watch, but are also trying to have loud critical notifications sound from your phone.