Ticker — Smart Notification Management for Home Assistant

a-e-s · March 4, 2026, 11:03pm

Hey everyone,

I’ve had Home Assistant running for a few years now and over time it’s grown into a pretty extensive setup — lots of automations, notifications, custom templating. One thing that always bugged me was how notifications are handled. Change your phone, add a tablet with the HA app, and suddenly you’re digging through automations to find every notify.mobile_app_* call that needs updating. Who gets what notification is scattered across dozens of automations with no central place to manage it.

I built Ticker to fix that. It’s a custom integration that’s been running in my own home since late 2025 and is now at v1.5.2.

v1.6.0, is in beta which did a lot of code polishing and cleanup. Some small bugs that were reported should now be solved and a couple of niece quality-of-life features are added. Try it out if you want by selecting the new beta on HACS.

AI disclosure:
This integration was built with AI assistance. I believe in transparency about this, and I’m happy to discuss any aspect of how it works.

What Ticker does

Ticker replaces all of that with a single ticker.notify service. Your automations declare what happened (a category like security or deliveries), and Ticker routes notifications to the right people based on their subscription preferences and conditions.

service: ticker.notify
data:
  category: security
  title: "Motion Detected"
  message: "Camera: Front Door"

That’s it. No device targeting, no person logic in your automations.

Features

Hey everyone,

I’ve had Home Assistant running for a few years now and over time it’s grown into a pretty extensive setup — lots of automations, notifications, custom templating. One thing that always bugged me was how notifications are handled. Change your phone, add a tablet with the HA app, and suddenly you’re digging through automations to find every notify.mobile_app_* call that needs updating. Who gets what notification is scattered across dozens of automations with no central place to manage it.

I built Ticker to fix that. It’s a custom integration that’s been running in my own home since late 2025 and is now at v1.4.0.

AI disclosure: This integration was built with AI assistance. I believe in transparency about this, and I’m happy to discuss any aspect of how it works.

What Ticker does

Ticker replaces all of that with a single ticker.notify service. Your automations declare what happened (a category like security or deliveries), and Ticker routes notifications to the right people based on their subscription preferences and conditions.

yaml

service: ticker.notify
data:
  category: security
  title: "Motion Detected"
  message: "Camera: Front Door"

Features

Per-person subscription modes: Always, Never, or Conditional (zone, time, entity state)
Smart queuing with bundled delivery on arrival
Notification actions (script, snooze, dismiss) — no second automation required
Device recipients for TVs, speakers, and tablets with push and TTS support
Critical notifications with automatic platform-specific payloads for iOS and Android
Compatible with Alarmo and blueprints via standard notify.ticker registration
Admin and user panels, notification history with inline images, logs, and dashboard sensors
Migration wizard to convert existing automations

Installation

HACS (custom repository for now)

Open HACS → Integrations
Three dots menu → Custom repositories
Add https://github.com/analytix-energy-solutions/ticker, select Integration
Search for “Ticker” and install
Restart Home Assistant
Settings → Devices & Services → Add Integration → Ticker

A PR for the HACS default store has been submitted.

Manual

Copy the ticker folder into custom_components/
Restart Home Assistant
Settings → Devices & Services → Add Integration → Ticker

Links

Feedback
Feedback, bug reports, and feature requests are welcome — either here, on GitHub, or in Discord.

License: GPL-3.0

cameron · March 5, 2026, 7:25am

Hi Thank you for this integration.

I did a test and my wife received the message but I didn’t.

Any help

Adec · March 5, 2026, 2:16pm

I’m testing out the integration. It’s early days yet but it looks really useful and I particularly like that individuals can decide which notifications they want to receive. Nicely done!

One comment I have though is on the history tab. I triggered one of my automations to send a test notification which get sent to my three devices (no surprises there). The history shows three notifications but doesn’t say which device they are sent to - so when reviewing the logs it’s not clear whether these are three separate notifications each sent to one device or one sent to three devices. I would expect if a separate entry is shown per notification & device combination that the log would also show the device. Alternatively the log should show a single notification in the history (with to without the devices it is sent to ). I hope this makes sense.

a-e-s · March 5, 2026, 3:27pm

Hi Cameron,

thanks for asking and happy to help! Your logs tab in the admin page should show you the exact sequence of events and what happened for each user (skipped, sent, etc and if sent: to which device). Hope that helps! If not: DM me and I am happy to have a look!

a-e-s · March 5, 2026, 3:32pm

Hi Adrian,

excellent feedback, and as I myself have notifications limited to one device I overlooked that! Keep an eye on this thread, I will have a look over the weekend to group notifications as you suggested and add it to a next version

Adec · March 5, 2026, 4:07pm

Hahaha… I could have easily missed this too. Ordinarily I would have most notifications sent to a single device only as well but I need to work out which device is my new iPhone rather than my old one first (and I was too lazy at the time of testing).

chezpaul2 · March 5, 2026, 4:08pm

hey Adec, which Parcel integration you using? Just curious.
Hey a-e-s Nice integration. I’ll try it.

Adec · March 5, 2026, 4:18pm

I’m using GitHub - jmdevita/parcel-ha: Unofficial ParcelApp integration with Home Assistant · GitHub. I used to the ParcelApp a long time ago but fell out of love with it (largely due to UK Royal Mail refusing third-party integrations) but I noticed the support has been added back so thought I’d give it a go again.

a-e-s · March 8, 2026, 10:18pm

I just released v1.1.0 which includes the grouping fix. Let me know what you think!

stefan1982 · March 9, 2026, 4:42am

Why does it use a complete different UI and isn’t it build in native HA components and inside the Ui itself like a true integration? I love its functionality, but I think it’s a pity that it is not native HA looking and stands out from the rest of the UI.

The only thing that I really would like is a card that allows me to display the notifications (per type) on the dashboard, but I could imagine that that is out of scope for this project?

a-e-s · March 9, 2026, 2:59pm

Hi Stefan!

Thanks for your feedback! Not having this in the original UI as a dedicated card is indeed a design choice and probably a matter of personal preference . To be honest: I didn’t really consider native UI because this was designed to be a page you set once and don’t think about too much after.

The card is a great idea: I will add this to the roadmap, but this won’t come on the short term.as there are a ton of cool features in development already. Would you be helped if the integration creates an entity per category that lists the last N messages in an attribute? That way you should be able to use a markdown card to show them in your own UI.

stefan1982 · March 9, 2026, 3:39pm

Yes! Definatly!

a-e-s · March 11, 2026, 6:13am

Hi Stefan!

keep an eye out for an update, will be releasing one later today that should create a few entities that do this. Test it if you want, and let me know if this covers your use-case.

a-e-s · March 11, 2026, 7:25pm

Update to v1.2.0 is released!

Advanced conditions, dashboard sensors & code optimization

Two major additions: the Advanced User Conditions feature and category sensor entities for dashboard integration.

Conditional lets users define rules based on zone, time of day, or entity state — all evaluated with AND logic. Two condition-level toggles control whether matching notifications are delivered immediately, queued for later, or both.
Dashboard sensors — Each category gets a sensor.ticker_<category> entity exposing the last 10 notifications as attributes, ready for Lovelace markdown cards or template sensors.

Thanks @stefan1982 for your suggestion, let me know if this helps!!

scude · March 16, 2026, 10:37am

Hello,

I’m still new to Home Assistant, with a freshly installed and fully updated Home Assistant Green, so I may simply be missing something obvious.

I’m currently testing Ticker, but in Ticker > Subscriptions, I get the following message:

No notify services No notification services linked.

However, on the Home Assistant side:

notify.mobile_app_[PHONE] does exist
sending a direct test notification works correctly
my user is properly configured in Settings > People
the phone is correctly linked to that person
the phone’s device_tracker exists and is used as the person’s source

I have also already restarted Home Assistant after checking everything.

So I’m wondering whether:

I missed an additional setup step,
there is a specific Ticker configuration detail I’m overlooking,
or this could possibly be a discovery bug.

Thanks in advance for your help, and apologies if this is a basic question.

a-e-s · March 16, 2026, 12:57pm

Hi! Thanks for reporting this, and no need to apologize: this is a great question that actually helped me identify an issue.

You haven’t missed a setup step, this is a problem on the side of Ticker that only affects fresh installations and wasn’t picked up because of that. Definitely something I need to fix, which I will do later today.

What you can do right now to verify your setup is correct:

Go to Developer Tools → Actions
Search for notify.mobile_app
Confirm your device shows up there (it sounds like it does, since direct test notifications work)

If it shows up there, your HA setup is 100% correct — Ticker just isn’t picking it up yet due to this discovery gap.

I’ll post an update here once the fix is available. Thank you for taking the time to report this, it’s exactly the kind of feedback that helps me improve this!

scude · March 16, 2026, 5:08pm

Thanks a lot for the clarification and for looking into it so quickly.

I confirm that notify.mobile_app_* is present in Developer Tools and direct notifications work correctly on my side.

I’ll wait for your update and test again once the fix is available.

scude · March 16, 2026, 5:49pm

Hi,
I just tested version 1.2.1 and everything is now working correctly on my side.

Thank you very much for the quick fix and your help.

a-e-s · March 16, 2026, 7:51pm

Cool! Let me know how the integration works for you, always nice to hear feedback!

malodie · March 17, 2026, 1:13am

Just started testing this. I’m having nothing show up except my pixel watch. Verified the notify.mobile is there. I’m on version 1.2.1.

Anything I can provide?

EDIT: I discovered the problem. The device name and the “notify” name need to match.