Basic groups can have a custom icon; but light groups are hardcoded to a standard icon. What the heck?
This also applies to cover groups, but I have no experience with those.
This may or may not apply to notify groups, as I don’t know if the icon would ever be visible.
If you compare the attributes when defining different kinds of groups:
By looking at git history, looks like icon support for basic groups was implemented in 2016, way before multiple kinds of groups were implemented. Which makes me question even more: why the heck the icon support is missing?
Suggestion
Light groups and Cover groups (and maybe Notify groups) should have an icon attribute.
Light groups and Cover groups should have the all attribute, for feature-parity with basic groups. I don’t use this feature, I can’t comment on it.
Rationale
To understand why I want this feature, look at this table:
| Group | Light | |
|---|---|---|
| Hot reloading without restarting Home Assistant | ✓ |  |
state_attr('…', 'brightness') |
|
✓ |
| Supported by slider-entity-row | |
✓ |
Standard groups don’t expose the combined attributes of its entities; thus, we can’t (easily) control multiple lights using a single standard group. Instead, we should use a light group.
However, light groups don’t support custom icons, which means I have to manually override the icon on the front-end (lovelace). Not only this is tedious, but it is even worse if the same light-group-entity is used in multiple front-end panels.
I also wish light groups could be reloaded without restarting, but that’s a wish for a different topic. (In other words, I wish for feature-parity between basic groups and specific groups.)
