Mobile App: Update Entity / Calendar Versioning for Betas

Feature Requests
1

My feature request is two fold. Please add an update entity to the mobile app platform, and release beta versions using the same calendar versioning that the rest of HASS uses.

  • I currently have a template sensor that indicates if a mobile app update is available because none of my devices are set to auto update.

  • For the longest time I was able to just scrape the latest version from the play store for that sensor and compare it to sensor.jphone_current_version. That got broken when Google stopped publishing versions on the app page.

  • Then I was able to get the latest version using the GitHub integration with sensor.home_assistant_android_latest_release which is great, except that the play store update is often many days behind the github release meaning an update shows available when there is no update really available.

  • Then again the template was broken when the mobile app version split into “-full” and whatever else there is. That was easily fixable in the template by truncating the current version value with [:-5].

  • Finally I was just able to clean up the template a bit with the new version() function.

So this is my current template, which does work.

        {{ version(states('sensor.jphone_current_version')[:-5])
            < version(states('sensor.home_assistant_android_latest_release')) }}

EXCEPT: I thought I’d join the mobile app beta and try to help out a bit there with testing. Now that broken my sensor again. Mobile app betas uses this versioning beta-2762-93844ffe instead of the calendar versioning eg(2022.10.0b2) the rest of HASS uses so they don’t work with the version function.

Also, right now I must account for mobile app updates separately in my update alert template (they are in group.other_update_entities).

          {{ states.update|selectattr('state','eq','on')|map(attribute='entity_id')|list
              + expand('group.other_update_entities')|selectattr('state','eq','on')|map(attribute='entity_id')|list }}

I think it would be most convenient to using an update entity for mobile app updates that handles all of this internally to determine if an update is available so it is standardized with the other integrations . I’d even bet if you got real creative with the “INSTALL” button for android devices you could probably even get the Play Store app to open to the Home Assistant app page on the device! No idea if that can be done for iOS. If not, a popup telling the user to update on the device would probably suffice.

This concludes my request!

2

Nice request for this the mobile_app integration will need to first support the update entity then the app can do some work with it.