I started out bridging entites to homekit a while ago without naming them within the homekit bridge on the HA side. I learned that you want to tweak the names so that talking to Siri gets more fluid and less artificial.
I made the mistake to change the names in the Home App on iOS.
Later when I added entities in the homekit config I also provided proper names to be shown in the iOS Home App.
My problem is now that Home App still uses the names I entered in the Home App, overriding the names I define in the homekit yaml config.
Do I have to start over or is there another way to make Home App forget the names I had entered in the app? (Just deleting the name in the settings fields does not work, it does not accept an empty field and snaps back to the current name.)
Just curious, why do you say it is a mistake to enter the name in the iOS home app? I am a newbie just setting up my bridge to HomeKit as well, and that seemed like the easiest route to take…
I’m not really clear on why there’s so many places to set the name of an entity, and none of them are authoratative. I would’ve assumed that I could configure the name of the entity in HA and it would propagate everywhere (including to HomeKit)…but it seems if you want your entities named consistently you need to manually set each of their names in at least 2 places - the HomeAssistant UI and the iOS Home app are the most convenient (to me), so I’m curious why would you opt to set them in the config file instead of in the Home app UI?
If you have the names in the config file you don’t need to put it in the app over an over again if you rename an entity. Of course then you need to update the mapping in the config.
I guess there is no really hard reason to do it that way. I just got tired of naming objects in the Homekit App while I was experimenting with some objects.
Ultimately I guess my reason is that HomeKit is just the “voice frontend” for my HA. So everything should be conifgured in HA and HomeKit just should merely “follow” the changes without touching its config.
But then again, it is useful to assign the objects to rooms in HomeKit, and I am not aware of a way to do that in HA and propagate it to Homekit. I guess it would be good if Area - entity relationships would be exported to HomeKit.