Here’s an evil “gotcha” that’s due to this new and unwanted “feature”.
If you are foolish enough to rename a device, the entities are renamed (if you choose to do so).
BUT
The friendly names are NOT changed and, because this new “feature” crops the name, it’s now impossible to get the friendly name back in sync with the entities name.
Example
A new lock is added called “Front Door”
But I want it to be called Front Door Lock because I have a load of things around the front door.
No problem, I rename the device and tell it to go ahead and rename its entities.
The result?
Device name: Front Door Lock
Entity name: Front Door Battery Percentage
Entity ID: sensor.front_door_lock_battery_percentage
Entity name: Front Door Connected
Entity ID: binary_sensor.front_door_lock_connected
Entity name: Front Door Lock
Entity ID: lock.front_door_lock
Ok, so I go in and rename the Entities
What I name it: Front Door Lock Battery Percentage
What it displays: Battery Percentage
And so on for the rest.
There seems to be NO way of ever displaying the name ever again!
So, it’s not only an unwanted feature, it’s also completely inconsistent as to how it behaves. It may display the interpreted full entity name sometimes, but it won’t display it other times.
I fully realize that changing the entity names when changing the device name probably should not change the friendly name.
BUT, if the friendly name is NOT set manually (it knows this because the field is empty and is greyed out) then it should conform the friendly name to the new name!
That’s pretty basic logic.
Of course this doesn’t change the fact that it should NEVER mangle or modify a display name that’s been set anyway.
Doing so not only negates the whole point of having the display name seperate from the database name in the first place, but by doing so it also tightly couples what’s displayed to the backend (which is a fundamental design flaw in home assistant).
Other examples of this huge design flaw can be seen in unit conversions and time display. There is no real distinction between the display front end and the back end data and it seems to be solely at the discretion, mood or preference of whomever is writing the particular bit of code.
It’s puzzling that this fundamental and very basic architecture issue seems to be just ignored, or, at best, enforced inconsistently.
It seems like what’s displayed to us is almost an inconvenience and how we have to go about displaying data to the real end users (friends, family, etc) is an afterthought, or just ignored.
Example: home assistant is not really touch friendly and seems stuck in an era of mouse clicking when most people interact with computers via tablets and phones.