WTH can't we send mobile notifications to all / groups (from the UI)

Archive Month of "What the heck?!" 2022
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Recently my wife replaced her phone. This caused problems because in all the automations (Doorbell and half a dozen others) I’ve now got to go through and manually remove her old phone and update it to the new device. It’s a pain because I don’t know at a glance which of our automations included an event to send a notification to her old phone, so I don’t know what needs updating until she says “Why didn’t I get notified about this?” :disappointed_relieved:

I know Groups can be made in yaml, but honestly having the capacity to make a notification / device group, and to be able to allocate devices to that group (Similar to how you do with Areas) would make a TON of sense too. It would mean I can send notifications to a group containing just me and my wife, and also easily exclude our flatmate for certain things.

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I ran into this with the iOS 16 update because the entity name changed for me & wife’s phones. Instead of updating all automations with the new entity name, I made groups in YAML for just my phone and another for just her phone (yes each group only has one member) and put the group name in place of the old entity name. This way I’ll never again have to go through a million places to update notifications when we change phones. Update the entity in the group and I’m done.

Completely agree there should be some easier way in the GUI to do this or to manage it so this kludge isn’t necessary.

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You can create a notify group for one or multiple devices and use this to send messages to. I use this since years and works great. So I can send a message to multiple devices at the same time and I can add/replace a device easy on 1 point.

- name: devices_all
  platform: group
  services:
    - service: mobile_app_skysphone
    - service: mobile_app_skyspad
    - service: mobile_app_iphone
    - service: mobile_app_skysbook
    - service: mobile_app_christians_macbook_pro
    - service: persistent_notification

But you can only add this via yaml. So maybe this should be made available from the gui. And you can reload the groups from the gui without restarting you system.

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