VPN client integrated into Home assistant app iOS/Android

[alnavasa (A)]

In order to connect to HA from outside your network from the phone, you need to either use duckdns and open ports in your router

Or connect via VPN.
To connect via VPN you need to enable VPN settings on your whole phone(at least in iOS), or maybe (not sure about this last one) enable VPN inside a browser app, though browser would let us just see dashboards but won’t upload the phone sensors (battery, location…)

I would love to have the VPN enabled just for HA app on the phone.

Adding the possibility to VPN straight from the app would be great.

And most importantly. SAFER than opening ports.

[frits1980 (Frits)]

What’s wrong with a VPN for your whole phone? That way other apps are safer too.

Besides that, Iike the ha developers to spend their time on cool features like they do now, not working on a VPN client. But you are welcome to develop it.

[vincen (Vincèn)]

Why not use Nabu Casa for that ? instead of looking for cumbersone solutions ?? and you’ll help project also

[koying (Chris B)]

@alnavasa

I would love to have the VPN enabled just for HA app on the phone.

If you use the Tailscale addon / VPN, only the Tailscale traffic will go through the VPN, not all your traffic (by default at least), if that’s what you mean.

If you actually mean to enable a VPN per app, I doubt this is possible.

[alnavasa (A)]

On iOS LTP2 VPNs tend to self disconnect after some time. Also Speeds drop massively.
I wouldn’t mind for myself to connect and disconnect the VPN, but thinking about my 70yo parents :S

[frits1980 (Frits)]

Ok, I know now why I don’t use an iphone. Thank you.

[koying (Chris B)]

If you feel adventurous…

Expose HA to the internet via a cloud reverse proxy (fly.io) and a VPN (tailscale) for free (for now) without opening ports

This is a different take at exposing HA to the internet: rather than having a remote proxy in your LAN and punching holes in your router to have Internet getting inside your house, we’ll have the reverse proxy running into the cloud on a fly.io instance, that will communicate with your HA instance via a tailscale VPN. Disclaimer: At time of writing, both fly.io and tailscale are startups looking at getting traction, so they offer generous free-tiered plan. As with all startups, they’ll likely n…

[edwin-2023]

+1 for Auto start vpn when starting ha client on android.
I do not want to open inbound ports neither want to run vpn all the time. Just when using ha (or some other apps)
So would be nice if ha auto starts a pre configured vpn.

[mario45211]

For anyone, who is still looking for solution, I managed to emulate that feature using an iOS Shortcuts - it’s simply enable/disable VPN every time I open or close HA app.