Mobile App Error on first connection

Mobile Apps
1

Hello all, I’m new to hass and I’ve been having fun piloting it. So far I’ve:

  1. Setup hass on a pi4
  2. Setup my first integration (MyQ garage door opener)
  3. Successfully triggered garage door opener from my browser in the overview panel.

Next up I wanted to control these from my phone. I installed the official hass mobile app. On initial load you are greeted with a message:
Select the instance you would like to connect to:
Home
http://172.30.32.1:8123:8123 (this was prepopulated)

When tapping this I get the following error
Unable to connect to Home Assistant.
There was an error loading Home Assistant, please review the connection settings and try again.

If I take myself off of wifi and reload the UI my only option is to enter an address manually. I have no idea what to enter here and would assume by default hass is not exposed to the outside internet.

I did some digging on mobile app documentation and found this page. It states the mobile app integration is enabled by default but I had a nosey in my console here to ensure I see the integration listed and I do. I dug around online and found others stating to try clearing the mobile app cache. This is the first time I’ve installed the app but I tried in anyway which predictably did not resolve the issue.

Can anyone advise if there is further troubleshooting documentation available or perhaps might know what to try next? TIA

2

I seemed to have found the answer. Hass initially installs with “advanced mode” off. I found a post about it here. Turning advanced mode on enables the ability to connect with the phone app. I stumbled onto this fix accidentally by wanting to SSH into hass to ensure the config file really did have mobile_app: enabled. To install ssh in add-ons I had to turn on advanced mode first as a pre-requisite and magically before ssh’ing in the mobile app was working.

To turn on advanced mode, in the left panel of your hass UI at the bottom is your name (profile). Click on it and it is currently the 8th option down from the top at the time of writing. Enable advanced mode and all of a sudden you will be able to use the mobile app. Leaving this here in hopes someone else will find it and it will help them.

I think the hass developers should consider having mobile app enabled even in simple mode.