Hi,
I have a few of flood and smoke detectors hooked up to the HA and I am using the official Android Companion App.
Problem is that my phone is on silent all the time, so those notifications don’t make a sound.
I would like to distinguish between “normal” notifications, which can stay silent and “danger” notifications which will sound no matter what.
I know Android let’s you set different categories for notification based on what the app supports, but HA app only has “Default Channel” and “Miscellaneous” and even if that worked I think there is no way to make them sound with phone on silent.
I also have Tasker, so I can basically achieve this by reading the notification by HA app and based on the Title I can play a sound, but I am looking for something more straight forward, so I can, for example set the priority directly in HA and based on that the phone would either stay silent or make a sound.
Does anyone know about such app or solution to this?
Thanks
Unfortunatelly this works only on iOS, with their support for critical notifications. On Android you can only set priority which I assume makes the notification stay on top, but if the phone is muted, it makes no sound, and is still on the “Default Channel” so I can’t even select different sound for it.
notification channels were merged today, if you join the android beta version you can play with it today and create as many as you want and adjust the sound and DnD settings.
@katsaplias yea, but I think Android would actually need to support this first, but thank you anyway
@dshokouhi thank you for the info, I will try that out. Problem is that even when I set the DnD settings (override DnD) it will not make a sound, since I usually put my phone to vibrate-only mode, not actually to DnD, that would mute the phone, turn off vibrations and not display notifications when they arrive from other apps. But as I said I guess this is a limitation of Android and not an easy thing to fix, except for turning on the sound for a bit, wait for the notification sound to play, and then turning it back off (as Tasker does). I wish they added one toggle not only for DnD but muted sound aswell.
Yea DnD was designed to replace the feature you are after so if you really want it to work you will want to switch to DnD or just continue to use Tasker. Personally I opt for Tasker to handle things like changing the system ring options etc…
Channels will at least allow you to change the ringtone for differentiating things.
Yea, having channels is a really nice feature, it will be great to have different sounds for each notification type.
I think I will stick with the Tasker now, I am prefixing titles with either [W] (warning) or [D] (danger) and parsing this in the Tasker and I also have SMS backup with ESP + SIM800L, so this will do for the moment.
Big thanks to the devs for such a great work on this.
That is also a good solution for those critical notifications and the calls are quite cheap aswell, I will give it a try. Only downside is that if the internet goes down, there is no notification, for this my SIM800L GSM gateway is better (if at least the home Wifi works, but that is all on UPS), however having the HA call me and read a text has definitely higher cool factor
You could look into the Pushover notification integration for ‘danger’ level.
I use them for home alarm notifications etc. and we also use it for out of hour notifications for work infrastructure.
You can set Pushover to override DnD by using the Alarm notification channel based on the priority value assigned to the notification (controllable from the HA integration). You can force repeating notifications until acknowledged.
Before I stabilised our work infrastructure I was woken enough times in the middle of the night to confirm that this does work as advertised.
Keep in mind DnD is not the same as placing your phone on vibrate or silent. Thats the issue users have today with notification channels. Notification channels can override DnD but cannot take the phone out of vibrate or silent.
when I said Alarm notification channel I should have said Alarm channel, which is the wording used in the Pushover app option for high-priority notifications.
The bottom line is that with my phone silenced (not on DnD), and the correct parameters passed to the Pushover notification integration the app will play a sound - the app option states:
Play tone for high-priority notifications through alarm channel, bypassing device’s normal alert volume and silent mode - enable with care
As I mentioned I’ve used the app for a number of years, and have in fact just sent myself a high-priority notification with the phone notifications silenced.
Thank you, I will try Pushover, what you described is something I was hoping for. I know Android has multiple “sound” channels (ring, notification, alarm, media, etc…) and when I put my phone on silent, it will set only ring and notification channels to silent, others are still on, so if Pushover is able to use Alarm channel, that should work.
@dshokouhi Would it be please possible to have not only different notification channels (which works fine btw, in the beta I tried), but also ability to have critical notifications play the sound on the “alarm” sound channel? This one doesn’t get muted when phone is on silent (not DnD), but there would also have to be a way to select a sound to be played, since I assume this will not use the same notification channel sound, thus not being able to select custom sound based on notification channel.
@smoke.007 yes, I already tried it in the beta, we were talking about it a few posts back, the problem with this is, that override DnD won’t work if you put your phone to silent mode (clicking on the speaker icon toggle in the notification drawer), or putting your phone to vibrate only mode.
This will work properly for the critical notifications when the sound channels/streams are added.
For now easiest solution is using Pushover as suggested by TazUk, or using Tasker to grab the notification title and play sound on the Alarm sound channel.
