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.