*** EDIT ***
Please feel free to post anything related GrapheneOS with Home Assistant here, regardless if it’s related to my original question or not.
I’m most probably getting a new phone on which I will install Graphene OS in order to improve the privacy of my data. It’s going to be my first time with Graphene, I still have a lot to learn.
What should I know about the limitations I may encounter in relation to the Home Assistant mobile app within a Graphene environment?
From my research in this forum, apparently we are dependant on Google’s Firebase for notifications and on Google for some location functionalities.
I am ready to authorize some Google services if necessary, and carefully selected case by case.
Anything special about Home Assistant mobile app within Graphene I should know before I make the jump?
you will be installing the minimal version as you most likely will not find a version of gapps that contains the proper API for everything to work, like location tracking.
location tracking yes but notifications no, you can use local push
everything you need to know about the app is on the site linked above, lots of info to go through. First link goes over what you lose by installing the minimal version which is the only supported version if you plan on using a custom ROM.
The minimal release of the app works very well. The only real limitation is that you can’t use the app’s location sensor to update your location in HA. But you can use OwnTracks to do that.
Both apps are in F-Droid, so no sweat installing them.
You will have to enable persistent connection to HA in order to get notifications at home, and set up a VPN to get notifications and use HA outside home. HA does not yet support UnifiedPush / NTFY (I opened a ticket to ask for support for that).
IF you want to install the Play Store version of the Companion app, you can do that too, but you will first have to install Google Services Framework, Google Play Services and Google Play Store. You can do this from the Apps app shipped by Graphene.
Congrats on choosing Graphene! It’s the most secure and quite the fast OS for phones today.
I’ve been running GrapheOS on a Pixel 7 for over a year now. OwnTracks hardly ever worked; even though it was running it would not show on my HA instance. I had it pointing to my nabucasa external domain name.
For a while I had the OwnTracks device configured under my person profile to be a location source and presence source.The intention was to augment or supplement my location on top of the standard Wi-Fi presence device tracker that I have associated with my phone. Unfortunately, it showed me, as present in my home, far too often when I wasn’t, because OwnTracks is set to only submit your location on significant location changes.
If only I could make OwnTracks submit my location, but not “detect that i am home”, that woyud be just perfect.
I am currently using Graphene OS and the Home Assistant app seems a bit buggy. For example, I often get notifications about it connecting to HomeAssistant, even when my HA is switched off, like, no electricity.
WebSocketRepository: java.net.ConnectException: Failed to connect to %my_ip_v6%
WebSocketRepository: Caused by: android.system.ErrnoException: connect failed: ENETUNREACH (Network is unreachable)
Which makes sense - it cannot reach HA device that is off. But I can’t find the part of log that refers to that nonexistant connection being detected - probably because errors are spammed a lot and the app shows only a limited length of log.
I guess I need to use webview to see the full log without cuts, but unfortunately I haven’t had time for this yet.
I will leave this discussion open, for anyone interested in this topic of GrapheneOS with Home Assistant.
On my part I installed GrapheneOS almost a year ago, and I will not go back to regular OS. I was expecting to face some bugs and searching for hours in forums but in fact it was a very simple, easy and smooth experience: just following a few and clear instructions that actually give the expected result, in a small amount of time. There is an extra time to tweak some parameters, but it’s largely compensated by having zero time spent to uninstall/deactivate unwanted apps and opting-out from all the options going against respecting privacy.
On my part, I actually installed the Google Play Services app - paradoxically, I think it still makes sense since I decided to opt in for it and and I have control on the permissions of the Google Play Services. The Home Assistant app has been working very fine so far. I did not notice any difference from when it was installed on a regular OS. Maybe a small number of sensors are not there, but I don’t remember which ones, so nothing really significant. I’d encourage anyone interested to do the same.
All i want is for HA to be able to route normal mobile app notifications over NTFY / Nextcloud Push. The existing integrations simply do not support the same features. Other apps support getting their notifications over UnifiedPush — why can’t the HA companion do the same?