Notify service is missing for new device

Mobile Apps Home Assistant Companion for Apple
1

I created a new Home Assistant login for my wife, as a “user”, not an “admin”. I downloaded the Home Assistant app to her iPhone, logged in as her, and granted all the permissions (except the pop-up that stays “critical alerts which will override do-not-disturb”. I’m not crazy, after all :).

I expected a new notify service to be automatically created in Home Assistant, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. So essentially, I can call “notify.notify”, and it successfully sends push notification to both phones, but can’t figure out how to notify just her phone. Only mine.

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What is notify.mobile_app_iphone?

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Just tested notify.mobile_app_iphone, and it’s my wife’s iPhone. D’oh !!

Good to have smart friends looking over my shoulder, and glad I included a screenshot. I guess I was partially thrown off because within Node-RED add-on, my notify.mobile_app_chads_iphone7 was prepopulated as an option in the “Service” drop-down, whereas my wife’s wasn’t.

  1. Out of curiosity, what causes Home Assistant services to get populated into Node-RED for easier selection ?
  2. How can I rename my wife’s iPhone service to a more meaningful name.

Thanks so much for the help !

-Chad

4
  1. I don’t know, I don’t use Node-RED
  2. In the app under App-Configuration there is a setting somewhere for the device name. I don’t know if you need to delete and readd the device afterwards or if a reboot of HA is enough.
1 Like
5

I just encountered this issue and the response from @Burningstone was really helpful.

I think the issue is that two iphones with the HA app installed report the same device id and so you can’t send notifications to the second device.

To debug the issue, go into web interface of home assistant and look in the Dev Tools section (http://x.x.x.x:8123/developer-tools/service)
Look at the tab Service, look for the items starting notify.mobile_app........ There is probably only one element notify.mobile_app_iphone. The issue is there is only 1 phone in this list!

Solution:
To correct this on your device, go to the HA app → Settings → Companion App
In this screen click on your user, and it will show 3 sections (Status, Details and Privacy)
Under Details update the device name.
Restart the home assistant mobile app.

Now if you look at the Dev tools on the web it will show the new device under notify.mobile_app_yournewdevicename

Also this new device will be accessible from node red.

4 Likes
6

Wow, I totally missed how to do this for the passed 3 days. 4 of the 6 iPhones in my HA had no assigned name from their companion app, only “iPhone” and I couldn’t figure out how to fix this so I could notify them individually. Thank you! 1 problem down…only 999+ to go.