Today we’re releasing Home Assistant Companion for Android 1.5.0. This is a great release with some cool new features and new collaborators joining in on the fun!
Big thanks in this release goes to our Android lead @JBassett who has been squashing a ton of bugs, added support for the status bar to adopt the application theme and fixed finding existing Home Assistant instances on the network.
A cool new feature that has been added is a new home screen widget. Use it to quickly trigger your favorite scripts, scenes or any other service in Home Assistant. Thanks to @KBerstene for the initial implementation and @JBassett for polishing the configuration screen.
For all you people that want to run the Home Assistant app on a tablet on the wall, good news! Thanks to @neopilou there is now a new option to make the app full screen.
Firstly, thanks to the team that has been adding features to the mobile app. We android users appreciate the love.
@JBassett, maybe I’m misunderstanding this portion of the above
I took this to mean that the top of the screen would change according to the loaded theme. When I load the dark orange theme it is still blue as seen below. I cleared the app data and cache but still see the same. Is this expected?
Wahoo ! Thank you for the development and keep a useful and light app (especially for my battery )
I tried the widget, but isn’t it possible to show the sensor only without call a service ?
Is only me having issue to switch on light using widget?
I’ve tried with light.turn_on and light.toggle but nothing happening. Light is not turning on.
PS. Fixed. I’ve clear data in the app and now works.
FWIW, I now have three ways to access Home Assistant from my phone:
Web App (an URL to the server)
Home Assistant Companion (Android app)
HA Client (Android app)
I currently still prefer HA Client, predominately due to startup speed (from icon-tap to fully rendering the Lovelace UI):
Web App: 8 seconds
Home Assistant Companion: 8 seconds
HA Client: 3 seconds
I’ve repeated the test several times and HA Client’s startup is consistently two to three times faster. I’m not sure what technique the developer is using to accelerate startup but it makes for a better UX.
I’ve missed that since ever. No App compatible with HA could do this. Finally!
Turning my room off from my home screen (widget) would (will) be awesome.
Until now I used Automagic for that, enabled the API and sent a request with turn_on or turn_off to my HA IP. It also works, but it is (was) annoying to set up - for every light.
Or the front-end developers may wish to examine how the author of HA Client reduces startup time. Maybe it’s something they can adopt (or maybe it’s not because it uses it’s own widgets to render the UI).
You need to file a bug, they won’t look at that app. The front end should load and be ready in 1 second. If you think its an issue, you should file it.
Is that currently achievable or is it an aspirational goal?
I’m asking because no Home Assistant app I’ve tried (on my phone) goes from cold-start to full UI-render in under 3 seconds.
I mention it in the spirit of sharing comparative performance data; someone out there has created an Android app that is noticeably faster on startup. Perhaps it may be of interest to the developers of Home Assistant Companion. There may be some technique it employs that is worth emulating.
So the app on my current phone takes about 2-3 seconds to load, from cold start. If yours really takes 7 seconds then maybe try clearing data and see if that resolves it?
The issue I was talking about was when you open the app and it stays on loading data or you see the reconnecting sign at the bottom. That should only be visible for 1 second.
