Is there a way to force HomeAssistant to recognize a new device?
I went to the Companion App and changed the “Device Name” string hoping that the app would try to contact my server.
But when I go to my server URL and go to the Configuration->Integrations page, I do not see the mobile app integration listed.
Also when I go to Configuration->Devices page, I do not see either of the 2 android devices that I would have expected to see listed.
I think I found a work-around thanks to the following post:
Simply changing “App Configuration” parameters does not apparently trigger the app to update any device info at the server.
What worked was going to the App settings in the Home Assistant phone app, and clearing data.
Then when I reopened the app, I had to re-setup the connection details in order to connect to the server again.
At that point the Mobile App Integration showed up, along with reference links to my android device and the 4 new entities.
It’s a shame though, that I couldn’t change the device name before I tapped the “Finish” button during the first-time phone app configuration.
I was hoping I could chose unique names to avoid conflicts with other android devices on my network.
It looks like I need to make the name changes manually after each mobile app integration is added for each phone.
any time you change the device name in this page you need to restart HA for the change to take place. It only updates entities not yet added and the service call, it won’t update entities that get added before you changed the name. For those you can use the HA front end to change.
There is a feature request on github to ask for device name during onboarding. There is actually no conflict when you login with multiple devices with the same name as they end up having _2 at the end of them and each device gets its own integration to keep things separate. Changing the device name updates the service call which helps clear up that confusion. So a little jumbled but you can still update everything so there is no conflict. Each device has its own unique ID to avoid that conflict and allow for you to change them in the frontend.