WTH: iOS app having more than one Home Assistant

Thanks for the info @iamhueman. Hopefully this is something in development as I’m sure all the developers have more than one setup as well but its nice to have a work around for some functionality anyway!

This isn’t a requested feature. Guys, it’s a must. Just name one single app from Aqara, Tuya, Broadlink, Apple Home, Google Home, BlitzWolf that doesn’t have this multiple-homes feature. They all do! Know it’s hard now, but things should’ve been built for multi-home from the ground up.

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Just a question or idea on how it could work, but can HA integrate with multiple instances? Here is an example:

  • Have a master HA node and add a “site” through some sort of pairing.
  • Each node has knowledge of all other nodes.
  • for the mobile app, perhaps you choose a primary node to report into, or there is some intelligence to pick the routing
  • then that leads to the idea that the mobile entity is a “shared” entity for all sites in the HA cluster and there is some real cool possibilities there I’d think, because the user is the next entity that could be shared/synced across remote nodes.

Sounds involved, but if you break it out to the core ask the first 2 bullets should help to establish the trust relationship of info sharing. Then the only thing you really change in the mobile app is which site you are seeing data for and this could be synced from any of the node sites and the user ACL could control who sees what sites.

Can’t you just buy another iPhone for each instance?
-Tim Cook

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Since having multiple instances of the same app, is not possible on iOS (Or Android for that matter - without “Hacks”) - the solution here is to add different “servers” to HA and allow it to connect to a different server based on User login info.

Isn’t the iOS application open source? Could you make some minimal change like changing some application identifier, compile and then install it yourself? Would there be some conflict?

There are of course some limitations in using the applications you have compiled and I don’t know the details. For free you can use the application for couple of weeks and with paid developer licence for one year maybe?

If you have found a way to do this, please share! I, too, want to simply integrate TWO HA instances. Let’s call them House A and B with family A and B.

I want to have certain entities in House A exposed to House B, so that a House B user, looking at their House B gui, will also see the shared House A entities which have been exposed.

Bonus points if users from House A can travel to House B and House B will notice they are there.

Using nerd IT words, I’m talking about a domain trust, or federation, or client-server, or peer network, or something like that. Simply an integration that allows House A to trust House B and vice-versa.

If this exists, I sure can’t find it!

If anyone’s looking for a workaround, i’ve been using this custom component: Remote Home Assistant

Just checking in on this. It looks like the most recent info from the developer is in a GitHub discussion: Accommodate multiple instances of Home Assistant from the app.

As of Oct 2021, this issue got 145 votes here, and 209 :+1: on GitHub. So the demand for this feature doesn’t seem that high. Anyone that’s interested in this functionality should probably vote (without adding me too posts) in both locations.

So far I haven’t really seen a “spec” or user story for what the desired functionality is. The mobile app has a pretty rich set of functionality covering notifications, mobile device sensors, NFC tags, iOS integration (widgets, watch) and probably a bunch more.

For myself, the highest priority would be to be able to get iOS notifications from multiple Home Assistant Instances. For display purposes, I’m getting by with Safari icons on the home screen.

One thing I haven’t seen so far is, what is the recommended process to cleanly switch the mobile application between instances? The mobile app seems complex enough that more might be needed than just changing URLs.

As of Oct 2021, this issue got 145 votes here, and 209 :+1: on GitHub. So the demand for this feature doesn’t seem that high

I mean, it’s worth pointing out that this is the second-most-commented issue on GitHub, as well as the most-upvoted issue on GitHub, so I don’t think the demand can be classified as “not that high”.

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I have 3 instances of home assistant and would greatly benefit from being able to select which instance I need. On Android, you can use app cloner to kind of create a workaround but this won’t work on iOS.

While we would all love this feature, what are you doing right now, especially on iOS?

I’m running my second instance as a PWA which works great. The only missing component is notifications - I would like alerts when the security system is triggered or if the water sensor detects a leak, etc.

Has anyone tried one of the third-party apps? That’s another avenue I’m exploring, but they seem to all have their own dashboards, which would have to be created. Definitely a PITA.

Unless I’m not understanding what you are asking, multi-server support was added to the companion app a number of months ago. So you can switch between servers with a three finger swipe and the servers can all send Apple push notifications.

I can’t believe I missed that. Thanks!

I missed that first, it’s a great feature to have all my instances in one app.

Though, it’s actually easier to have 3 cloned apps on Android each with their own icon and color…