Location issues and a couple other things

Mobile Apps Home Assistant Companion for Apple
1

So I am having problems with the phone properly reporting when I am entering and leaving the zone I have creatively called “Home.” When it does work, it catches me leaving but does not let me back in. (I’m gonna make a second zone for when I walk to the grocery store today to see if it catches that.)

Also, right now HA is detecting two iPhones. Not sure why. Maybe one is my iPad but I think it would say that in the dashboard then. (EDIT: Nope, it’s seeing two phones. I just turned on location tracking for the iPad version and it’s tracking that separate now.)

Finally, how do I specify what path I want the app to connect to? Right now it insists on connecting to my internal address, but I set up an external redirect so I can get to the server when I am away from home and want to connect using that.

2

For your second question.

Close the app. Turn on airplane mode. When launching the app it will now let you change the server to whatever you want.

3

While that appears to be true, it isn’t giving me any ability to back out of the Settings menu now that I have turned airplane mode back off, and it’s not acknowledging the connection. The same redirect is working if I connect via a web browser in the usual manner.

Then if I force-quit and relaunch, it discovers the internal address again.

4

HA is most likely “detecting” two iPhones because you reinstalled twice. I’m unsure why enter or exit geofence updates aren’t working, as I haven’t had any issues personally, nor have the people that live with me had issues.

5

Except it was only detecting the one when I first set it all up…this didn’t start happening until I updated HASS itself to whatever the current version is yesterday or the day before, I think.

Is there a way to “blow out” detected devices and have HASS re-detect them? Would killing known_devices.yaml accomplish that? (Answer: Yes. That MAY have fixed it? I thought it was still showing two but that may have been a browser caching issue. On my laptop it’s only showing one device each. We’ll see if it does battery reporting and such correctly when it gets around to checking.)

6

Sorry I thought you meant two devices were appearing as sensors and in ios.conf. You were correct that wiping out known_devices.yaml would fix duplicate devices like you experienced.

7

Yep. Now I need to figure out how to get the app to connect to my HASS server outside of my network. If I go into airplane mode I can specify the URL but can’t back out to make the connection.

8

Location tracking is still sketchy at best…sometimes it notices and reports when I leave a zone, sometimes it notices when I enter a zone, but it’s never 100% on either side. It is unreliable to the point that there’s no point in using it for any sort of automation purpose if it can’t be trusted to trigger reliably.

(And it’s useless anyhow if it can’t connect to the server from the outside world so the server can trigger whatever it’s supposed to trigger.)

9

So now that it will connect to HTTPS again with the new web-based UI (yay!) I can install and play with location stuff again.

But what if I want my automation to notify both my iPhone AND my iPad? For example, right now I have something like:

- alias: 'iOS HASS startup notification'
  hide_entity: false
  trigger:
    platform: event
    event_type: homeassistant_start
  action:
    - delay:
        seconds: 20
    - service: notify.ios_freds_iphone
      data:
        message: "HASS server has restarted!"
        data:
          subtitle: "Subtitle goes here"

Is there an easy way to use notify.ios_freds_ipad as well, or do I have to duplicate the entire block for the iPad as well?

10

You could make a Notify Group. That’s what I do. I have groups of groups in fact.

11

Ah, I think that is exactly what I want! Thank you! :slight_smile:

12

Robbie with the latest beta I cannot add track_ios: true to my configuration file. It says it is not supported.

13