WTH android app can't handle multiple HA instances

Archive Month of "What the heck?!" (2020)
1

I’ve an HA instance at home and another at my holiday apartment: it would be great to have a “choose your instance” screen to handle both from the android app.

2

I have the same problem here. Then you also need to be able to have different sensor settings to both instances and name them/choose icon.

3

Me 2 want this. I have HA both in my home and boat. Please look into this :heart:

4

I’ll third this… The app being able to control more than one instance would be amazing.

5

A simple drop down list/menu to select the active “home” would be good enough. Apposed to having two active instances connected with two homes, which I gather introduces more complexity. If you could just choose the active home from a list this avoids the need to manually retype the IP address when switching homes.

1 Like
6

For me, this also would be nice.

7

This is a “me too” post.

Also this has been requested here and here

1 Like
8

+1 requesting this feature.

I can see why It’s going to be tricky though, since simply logging in with the HA app to your phone does a lot more integration and sensor work behind the scenes.

For example, if I am a user of Home A and Home B, when I “drop down” and choose which home to control, which home am I physically located at, and should my geosense location be reported or changed or ignored or ?? If HA thinks I’m at Home A, but I have dropped down to control Home B, should I be considiered “home” at home B now? And therefore do all the location awareness stuff for being in Home B now?

Yeah, tricky. :slight_smile:

9

I’m in the middle of moving HA from 100% YAML-managed docker container to UI managed HA OS instance. For that I need access to both systems from my Android phone which doesn’t support any kind of user profiles.

In Android any app can have only one instance installed - this is based on package name. HA app name is io.homeassistant.companion.android.

BUT, if you download and install any minimal release from Github then you can run it in addition because its name is io.homeassistant.companion.android.minimal i.e different.

More complicated is to repack the app or even build it from source. In this case you can choose whatever name you like (and also change app icon for instance).