WTH is there no way to notify a person next to mobile_app enitites?

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

I have a lot of push notifications to my phone. I recently switched phones and so did the name of the phone (and mobile integration). I had to change a lot of automation service calls to adapt to the new name. (Yes I used vim to quickly replace all in yaml, though good luck if you want to use the UI to do so).

Is it an idea to be able to notify a person? E.g. when I have device trackers capable of receiving push notifications, they should be notified?

E.g.

Paulus has an iPhoneX and this device_tracker is linked to the person Paulus, Send Paulus a message would then figure out that it has to send it to the iPhone’s mobile_app integration.

Now whenever Paulus gets himself a fancy new iPhone 11 Pro Max Deluxe Special Edition, he can just change his notifcation entity in is profile settings or person configuration.

Perhaps we could add a “notification entity” for a person, that way you can select on what device you would like to see notifications that are triggered and sent to you as a person by HA automations. It could even be a list so you can send msg to Paulus’ iPhone and Paulus’ iPad just by sending a message to the Paulus person entity. You could also add an email address to the person and give it as an option to send an email to them as well.

Yes? No? Your thoughts?

2

This is why I use the notification group platform. A single place to update.

3 Likes
3

Yeah, notification groups for the win.

4

Notification groups are great, and I use them myself, but a person notification platform would also be nice.

If you install the Home Assistant mobile app the device tracker gets automatically associated with the person (if the person is linked to your user) so doing the same with the notification platform would definitely simplify things.

3 Likes
5

For sure, the only reason I use the group platform is because this does not exist. Voted.

1 Like
6

Enlighten me here, will you? :smiley:

7

This:

notify:
  - platform: group
    name: myphone
    services:
      - service: mobile_app_myphone

Used as notify.myphone everywhere. If you change your phone you only have to change the service in the group platform and can keep using notify.myphone everywhere. You can of course add more than one service to the group if you wish.

3 Likes
8

Oh OK, so basically this is what I was requesting, only addition is that the notify group can be hooked up to a person and you could do notify.Paulus

Didn’t know that notify group thing was possible.

9

This is a fantastic idea. I am adding this right NOW!

10

You can also change the device name in the app settings, which will change the notify service name accordingly (although you still need to restart Home Assistant). For example, if I change my device name from “old phone” to “new phone” the service name will change from notify.mobile_app_old_phone to notify.mobile_app_new_phone. At least this works for the Android app, I don’t know if this works for the iOS app.

But for sure a notification service related to persons would be great! Would make it a lot easier for my housemates to install Home Assistant on their phones without doing any “advanced” things in the settings :smile:.

11

Is there any work on this? For now I think you can only use html5 notification for a person right? Would be nice to link a notification service or mobile app to a person.

For example I would love to be able to just notify all people that are at home right now. I am sure this is possible but involves a lot of templating and configuration and probably needs to be repeated in every automation I want to use that feature…

Maybe someone knows something new about that feature?

12

I created a script blueprint that makes notifying all people at home a bit easier: Notify all persons that are currently at home

Maybe it’s not exactly what you asked for, but for now this will keep the amount of repeated templates minimal.