The original intent for rooms was to allow the ‘interface’ to change based on the selected room. That’s what I gathered. Now you can just cast to specific devices. I tried to correlate that behavior. Sorry if i’m out in left field.
I would imagine that maybe in the future we could use ‘areas’ as a way to limit a users access to certain entities. ie: user 1 can access entities associated with any room, user 2 can only access entities associated with lounge room and kitchen…etc. Just a thought
Is it still not available? I have a lot of rfxtrx sensors and switches and I would like to assign them to areas.
And what are you going to do with these areas? They literally do nothing at the moment. No organizational benefit in the backend or UI. No automation benefit. Nothing.
That’s not true at all. Devices in the same area are automatically grouped together if you are using the automatically generated front end.
Oh man, color me a liar. That’s so useful.
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It sounds like you’re being sarcastic but it’s certainly a move in the right direction if we are taking about the push to 1.0.
If you try to have a non-technical user set up HA they are going to have a really tough time if everything isn’t laid out in an effective manner.
The on boarding process makes you select the area for devices so it’s really nice to have everything logically grouped the first time you open the UI.
It might not mean much to you, but it’s probably not “for” you.
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I never said it wasn’t. Was just simply saying that they are currently useless and serve no purpose. They were added a year ago and there hasn’t been any changes since. Until they make it so you can use these in automations/scripts, they’re still pretty useless.
It will also use the area as a room hint for Google Assistant - otherwise useless as you say.
Six months later I do a new HASS install and Google leads me back to this same place.
There is a feature request to allow non-‘Integration’ devices to be manually placed into Areas. I think that would solve it for me:
This thread alone should be a testament to how much effort they are putting into areas: “none”. I have faith. I’m hoping that they expand areas in general. I think this is the end plan because they haven’t moved groups into the UI yet. My assumption is that long term, areas will replace groups and behave the same way.
I just want to know how we can force authors to code their integrations so they’ll allow assignment into an area.
You can’t force them to do something, most developers are volunteers that sacrifice their free time.
@jjross, @Burningstone but HA can come up some guidelines for developers so they know what they can implement. no need to force 
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That still won’t fix existing components…
great response 
That’s my point. That’s the flaw in your o-so-insightful curt response
wtf does this have to do with anything. Are you implying that any small change will require the person to implement it into integrations? If so, bugs would never get fixed. And that still doesn’t account for components that have not upgraded in years.
That’s effectively what I meant. Force was far too harsh a word.
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I suspect things are going to get worse before they get better as groups are now being deprecated.
Don’t delete/regen your UI config, folks!