Just wanted to share this as I am really annoyed this happened. Last night I saw an update to the kiosk card , so i accepted and let this run and it then advised to clear the front end cache. So I looked through the mobile app and eventually ( not easy to find) I found it under debugging . I clicked the red link to Rest Frontend Cache and nothing happened , no messages, nothing. But then I noticed that in trying to go back into HA Lovelace dashboard I was prompted to change the name of my phone and I could not cancel .So I had no choice but to change the phone name. I then noticed that al the entities on my picture cards had disappeared and because the phone name had to be changed all of my automations that send notifications to that device or used that devices location no longer did so. The only way to get the entities back was to remove and re-install the app. I then and this is the really annoying bit , edit each automations yaml code to update the phone-device name. Now before anyone suggests I did not select the wrong link in the app as the top link that does reset entities db provides an “are you sure” message and I didn’t get that and didn’t loose the entities db contents. So my request here is that anyone providing an update please do not suggest a Front End Cache update as it requests a device name change … and my second request is somebody fixes the bug that causes this action please.
This might not have anything to do with the clearing of the cache.
HA can at times rediscover an already existing device and then it tries the add it, it the old now ghost device already exist.
Removing the device/integration and readd it is the way to solve it, but if you have used device ids in your automations then you need to edit everything. This is one of the reasons you often sees warnings against device ids in forum posts.
Thanks for the reply. It could be but seems odd it happened once I clicked the link to reset frontend cache
I do have the notifications integration using Pushover for some of my automations and that didnt require any changes. But I changed a while ago to the native App notifications due to slight delays in the pushover notifications to the device .
Sometimes things just correlate without having anything to do with each other and we humans try to make make up plausible reasons and connections. It is just human nature.
Sadly it will not be the last time you see this error, but hopefully next time it is with a device that is easier to correct than the phone. It is just bad luck that the phone was the one device hit.