Received notification on HA companion while remote, but no VPN or cloud attached

Mobile Apps Home Assistant Companion for Android
1

This sounds like pure operator error or blatant misconfiguration on my part - and maybe it has the simplest of explanations - but I can’t explain it.

I setup a push notification in January for an event which kicks off infrequently (automated hot-water boost). As I WFH I would always receive an notification on the HA Companion app as I was connected directly to WiFi, as expected, so all was good.

In February I was remote from my house on one of the days when the event kicked and I only looked at my phone after arriving back home and I noticed that I had a notification which reported the event trigger during a point in time when I was well away from WiFi. I ignored it as I assumed that it had probably been a queued message which appeared on my phone once I logged back into the home WiFi, but it remained in my mind.

Last weekend I was in another country, 1300km from home and I received a notification for a hot water boost event. I was on 4G at the time and I did not have my VPN running from my phone. I tapped the notification to bring up HA Companion and it gave me a “could not connect, retry?” message, as I had expected. Very soon after the event I quickly connected up my VPN and went into the HA Companion app and was able to ascertain that the event had triggered at the time when I received the notification. I was pretty stunned as I do not have the HA Cloud connection, the VPN was NOT connected and I do not have port forwarding enabled on my router for 8123 (or for any HA services or ports).

In HAC I have the connection set to the internal (non-routable) IP range.
Looking at the notification history in HAC I can see that the event was sourced from “FCM”, as were all of my messages whether on WiFi or not, and I just see a webhook_id and such. I do not see a transport type for delivery.

I’d love to go delve into my PFSense firewall logs, but they wrapped while I was still out of the country, but I cannot for the life of me work of how HA Companion received the notification while I was very clearly not on the home WiFi, nor VPN’d in, nor connected in any way that I know to HA on my home network.

What am I missing/doing wrong here or do I have a massive hole in my firewall…?

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Notifications use Google’s Firebase messaging platform. Zero connectivity back to your HA required.

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Thank you for this info. I since found some documentation on it so it’s clearer now.

I did find the setting for Persistent Connections in HAC and it’s not all that clear from there what’s going on:

Screenshot_20230329_075846_Home Assistant
Screenshot_20230329_075846_Home Assistant1080×2400 204 KB

Here it says “Persistent Connection” and I have the default setting of “Never”, but yet Google (Firebase) is the transport method. That’s not clear in the linked help page (https://companion.home-assistant.io/docs/notifications/notification-local.)

Could I suggest that this page be clarified so that the “never” setting is explained more clearly and that users know that it provides notifications remotely, even when not on the home network or VPN’d back to base? Even if it said “Push notifications will be delivered remotely via Google Firebase automatically. …”
There is probably a fair bit more rework required on that page to be honest, but that’s just a start.

Thanks again for the response though.

4

Suggest an edit to the docs - there’s an edit link at the bottom.

1 Like
5

Ok, thanks! I’m still learning.