WTH is there no Home Assistant app for Windows

Well a proper native app could offer some very nice benefits in the form of system sensors. The brand new macOS app has sensors for your computers battery level and state, storage space, etc so you could create some nifty automations around that.

One of the cooler sensors that Robbie just added to the Mac app is a camera one. So if you’re working from home in a video conference call, as soon as your camera becomes active it could turn on a light outside your room so your family members know not to disturb you.

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Yeah that does sound like it is useful. Consider me converted.

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Can there be an automation to make the dogs shut up when you are on a video call to the Courtroom!

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Zigbee shock collar? I see a million dollar business. Writing a patent now. :upside_down_face:

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How would I go about desktop notifications through chrome then?

You can use the HTML5 Push Notifications integration for desktop notifications through Chrome and Firefoox.

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Not trying to disagree with you that an app would be cool, but I’m accomplishing those two use cases currently with:

  1. Telegram Desktop for notifications (though this can be done a lot of ways)
  2. IOTLink for computer information (battery, CPU, memory, storage, etc) fed to HA via MQTT. I’d imagine the camera could be included in IOTLink as well, though I’ve not tried it.
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I like the “is my webcam turned on” sensor above.

An “am I in a call” sensor could also be used to pause the music you’re playing as soon as you go into a call, and resume when you leave. That’s something I find myself pausing manually and forgetting to resume.

Similarly, with “am I in full screen mode” it could automatically dim the lights when gaming / watching video.

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I like this one too. Having maybe the option to turn the display of or on so i can use a windows tablet for lovelace while being able to display lovelace based on presence

Sorry to hijack the thread but I don’t see any news about any macos app and I am interested, could anyone link me to some info or page about it?

There’s not a blog post or official documentation for the macOS app yet (I will start working on docs soon). For now you can read about it on the iOS release notes page. You can also download the Mac app from those release notes as well by pressing the “Assets” button.

The coolest part IMO is probably the “Active” sensor which determines whether your computer is currently in use by looking at a number of criteria - whether it’s locked, sleeping, if the screensaver is on, if you haven’t touched the mouse for a certain period of time (this is user configurable), etc.

And just an hour ago Zac released a new mac build with a microphone sensor. So now if you’re in a voice call or recording a podcast or something, Home Assistant can know about that and you can run automations based off that. Pretty neat.

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I have created a Home Assistant app for Windows (3 months ago), today I have added built-in browser to display HA web interface.

You can check it out here:

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Also maybe you could detect Focus Assist?

Moving my mouse would indeed be a pretty good and accurate presence detection. Just to add one more idea.

There are alot more when my desktop could receive HA commands.

My first thought was also “why?” as it runs fine in a browser. So I thought on android too.

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Agreed. I would love to be able to tell when I am at the computer. That is one of the reasons I proposed this because I saw how awesome the Mac App is!

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Iv been using this for quite a white https://iotlink.gitlab.io/

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It’s a pity that it is still not available.
Hope it will come soon.

Don’t hold your breath… nothing has been started. I don’t think there has even been a conversation. Just use chrome

While I have not tested this yet, I believe Windows 11 can, or will soon be able to, run Android apps. Not sure how natively that will run (meaning sensors for Windows machine and notifications) but it may be enough for some.

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I use this GitHub - mrvnklm/homeassistant-desktop: 🎛 Desktop application (Windows / macOS / Linux) for Home Assistant built with Electron but unfortunately it doesn’t support sensors. The ability to access Hass through the tray is awesome and really useful. Currently it does have some bug that causes it to lockup on Windows 11, not resolved yet.