Home Assistant Launcher for Android

sviudes · February 26, 2018, 10:36am

Home Assistant launcher is a simple Android app to use your Home Assistant web UI with some improvements:

Lock Screen
If you want to keep the access to Home Assistant password protected in your Android device, you have to logout and login everytime. Home Assistant launcher uses a simple lock screen, so you only have to enter your pin, or use your fingerprint (if your device supports it). It’s fast, and reliable. For this feature we are using this library: https://github.com/amirarcane/lock-screen

The app will prompt for pin everytime you open the app after:

You closed it
The app is on background for more than 10 seconds

Hide administrator menu items
You can hide administrator menu items from the drawer menu, so you can let your family members use home assistant without the risk they change any configuration parameter.

Back key behavior
If you are using Home Assistant through your web browser, Android back key behaves like browser back key. So, if you navigated through several tabs, pressing back key takes you to previous visited tab. Android apps don’t work that way (it should close the app). So this is the back key behavior:

If a “more info” popup is showing, popup will close.
Else, if section “Overview” is not showing, you will be back to “Overview”.
Else, you will exit the app.

You can download source code, and apk file here: https://github.com/sjvc/Home-Assistant-Launcher

TheAK · February 26, 2018, 10:45am

Wow! This is great! I’m going to see if I can buy some cheapo tablet and mount it on the wall permanently, using this app as the launcher.

jivesinger · February 26, 2018, 4:26pm

Awesome ! Restores the functionality I lost using ‘add to homescreen’ when I switched to https !!

Thankyou

dshokouhi · February 26, 2018, 4:33pm

Can this do immersive mode??? Would make wall mounted android tablets awesome

nordlead2005 · February 26, 2018, 5:20pm

I use https and I still have a shortcut on my homescreen. Did you delete the shortcut and the site data in chrome before trying to re-add it?

jivesinger · February 26, 2018, 5:58pm

I selected the shortcut but not the data.

Not an issue now anyway as I have your app

sviudes · February 26, 2018, 6:20pm

I prefer to see status bar, but AFAIK you can enable immersive mode using Tasker: https://www.xda-developers.com/how-to-enable-system-wide-immersive-mode-without-root/

CM000n · February 28, 2018, 10:40am

Or if you have a custom rom, you can usually set the immersive mode for each app there.
Works great for me on my old Galaxy Tab 2 with Lineage OS 13.

Thanks for this great app!

fernandex00 · February 28, 2018, 1:14pm

hi, i cant find the apk in the github files, can someone help me?

sviudes · February 28, 2018, 1:27pm

Just go to “releases” section

halfbaked · February 28, 2018, 2:15pm

If it is using mdns to find home assistant server that is another advantage you could list

nivekmai · March 2, 2018, 6:05pm

Can this prefill the password if I’m using one?

sviudes · March 3, 2018, 12:31am

I don’t understand your question. What do you mean?

Bobby_Nobble · March 3, 2018, 1:53am

That was fixed a while ago.

nivekmai · March 6, 2018, 1:41am

One of my main gripes with home assistant is that if you set an api_password (https://home-assistant.io/components/http/), you then need to enter that password for the web interface. If something goes wrong with your setup, it seems to get in a bad state and lose the cached password. Additionally, my password manager doesn’t seem to understand the login form for home assistant, and I’ve got family that doesn’t use a password manager.

It’d be cool if this thing could handle that setup, making it such that if it saw that a login form was presented, it filled in my password, so I didn’t have to get it out of my password manager (and instead, could just “fingerprint auth” my way into my home assistant.

I just looked into kinda what’s going on, and it’s just storing my password in localstorage under authToken, so it’d really be a matter of being able to run some JS and call

localstorage.setItem('authToken', password_as_a_string);

before showing the page, and home assistant would then see you as “logged in”.

sviudes · March 6, 2018, 8:38am

I’m sorry, but I still don’t get it… Why don’t you just check the “Remember” checkbox at login, so it won’t ask for password again? I’m using like this, and I just use “fingerprint auth”.

pklaus · March 6, 2018, 9:15am

Can this prefill the password if I’m using one?

Yes, it does remember the password and won’t show the login form again. You have to enter a chosen pin for the app, however, or authenticate with your fingerprint. See the images in the first post!

nelbs · March 11, 2018, 6:18pm

Awesome! This is great. Would it be possible to swipe between the tabs in HA?

sviudes · March 11, 2018, 6:31pm

Not yet, but it would be awesome! I’ll add it to the “TO DO” list. If anyone want to help, can send me a pull request.

anon43302295 · March 11, 2018, 6:41pm

Do you have a bit of a road map for things you want to do?

If I ever get some time sat in front of Android Studio at some point this year I was going to add opening web links in an external browser and something else that is on the tip of my tongue but I can’t think of atm!