iOS Companion App Slow (or fails) to Load

Mobile Apps Home Assistant Companion for Apple
1

Has anyone else noticed the iOS Companion App getting slower and slower, and in many cases failing to load altogether, especially on cellular? The transition from WiFi to Cellular when leaving the house, like when trying to close the garage door, has always been terrible IMO, often requiring closing the app and reopening it. But it has only gotten worse. Now, I find it difficult to get HA to load while some ways out approaching home, well beyond WiFi range. So is this a Nabu Casa issue or my configuration, but it hasn’t changed, nor has my dashboard, in a long time.

I often get the reload and refresh button at the bottom, or whatever it says, when it fails to load. That rarely works. It often requires at last a couple of close/reopen cycles to come up. The transition from WiFi to cellular and back when in close proximity definitely could be more robust. I don’t know what’s causing the failure to connect issues when approaching the house. I have the settings set to background app refresh and location is Always, but I worry about missing critical notifications, like Alarms, because it feels so flaky. And, to me, that’s the whole point in me having Nabu Casa Link. If that’s not reliable, then…

I’m just wondering if anyone else is experiencing this too. I’ve made few changes to my setup over the past 12-18 months, with the exception of updates (I’m on the latest everything now), but have definitely noticed a degradation in performance of the companion app over time.

2

Not so I have noticed. Could be a faulty custom card. Have you tried starting in safe mode to see if the pages load faster?

Also opening the web browser console on a desktop may reveal issues. e.g.

image
image722×600 32.6 KB

Your configuration may not have changed but the frontend version has changed. A card may no longer be working well with it.

3

Thanks Rusty. I did consider all of that, except for using the DevTools in my browser. I do use a bunch of Custom:Button Cards on my summary/home page on my dashboard, but these all load fast and fine in any browser. It is ONLY the companion app where it is slow or doesn’t load at all, but it is the delay from opening the app to displaying the dashboard that is the issue, not slow loading of the dashboard itself. Once the app connects, the dashboard loads quickly. It is really becoming a serious issue for me using my phone for accessing HA effectively. I can usually get it loaded, but it sometimes takes a while and several tries. It has only seemed to get worse with every new update.

I don’t believe it is the cards because it’s long before it ever tries to load a card. It is a connection issue to the server, I think, whether over WiFi or Nabu Casa. As I mentioned before, I’ve never found it to be robust switching from one to the other, but it is often unusable, especially when arriving home trying to open my garage. I now often get out and using the keypad (it’s faster than using HA , and I no longer carry a remote in my vehicles).

I will check the DevTools to see if anything pops up and maybe see if there are any updates to the .js resources used by my dashboard. Thanks for the response.

4

Try just having the Nabu Casa address in the Companion app as a test. That will let you know if the app is conflicting between local/and Nabu.

Your current HA About info would assist

5

Hmm… good idea. I’ll give that a try before leaving the house tomorrow. Thanks!

EDIT: Reading, it appears I can force that simply by turning off “precise location” in Location settings for HA in iOS settings.

6

Agreed, several ways to test in HA. I always go simple then move towards complexity when problem solving. My first thought was a race condition was causing a conflict. It’s always hard because we all have different configs!