Over the last week, we’ve released some awesome new features and improvements to Home Assistant Companion for Android. I wanted to take a moment to highlight some of the recent things that we introduced in 1.6 and 1.7.
Actionable notifications
Now you can define action buttons to attach to a notification dynamically. When you click one of those buttons, an event is fired back to Home Assistant so you can take action based on the button chosen.
Here’s an example to check with a user if they want to close the garage door after it has been left open for 30 minutes:
automation:
- alias: Notify apps when garage door opens
trigger:
platform: state
entity_id: cover.garage_door
from: 'closed'
to: 'open'
for: ‘0:30:00’
action:
service: notify.mobile_app_robbies_pixel_5
data:
message: "The garage has been left open"
data:
actions:
- action: "close_garage" # The key you are sending for the event
title: "Close Garage Door" # The button title
- alias: Close the garage when notification action is tapped
trigger:
platform: event
event_type: mobile_app_notification_action
event_data:
action: close_garage
action:
service: cover.close_cover
entity_id: cover.garage_door
After adding these automations, whenever your garage door remains open for 30 minutes, your device will get a notification that looks like this:
When you press that close garage button… your garage will close!
We are planning to expand notifications over the next few versions to continue to match the existing functionality available in the iOS app. That includes things like sending text back to Home Assistant and critical alerts.
Requesting location updates via notification
You can now send a notification with just the message request_location_update and once it reachces your device it will update its current location in Home Assistant. Be careful using this too much though, as it can drain your battery.
Sensors
New in version 1.7, we have added the first sensors to the app. For now, you will find the following new sensors:
- Battery percentage
- Battery state
- Current WiFi network information
We plan to keep expanding sensors in the near future to add things like cellular status and more.
Docs
Thanks to a few dedicated volunteers and a mad dash, we have a newly refreshed docs website. It’s using the latest version of Docusaurus which means it’s got a new coat of paint and even dark mode support. So much easier on the eyes!
In addition to the tooling updates, we’ve also begun documenting Android and iOS differences. Keep an eye out for the Android and Apple logos to denote what works where.
Over time we plan to bring Android and iOS as close together in terms of features and the ways they interact with Home Assistant so that, as much as possible, those that have users of both platforms have to do as little work.
Finale
In addition to the highlights above, we’ve also killed an impressive amount of bugs. Thanks goes to JBassett, KBerstene, quthla and neopilou for their work on all of the above.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/02/11/android-16-17-release/
