WTH, is there now a device tracker on everything?

WTH do we need a device tracker entity for everything? I was just looking through my entities list for my tp-link switches and plugs and they all have a device tracker. I am not too worried about where my light bulbs or light switches are. Pretty sure there not gallivanting around town at 2am. I just cannot understand what possible value that type of entity could add other that clutter. Plus it makes it harder to find my real device trackers, like phones and people. I understand I could probably go into each device and disable those entities, but who has the time… I will wait for that mass update tool that someone else suggested…

I assume you’re using a device tracker integration like the router integration or nmap. It’ll create device trackers for everything to say whether it’s connected to the network or not. Good for detecting whether you’ve lost communications with them, e.g. my Tasmota devices sometimes crash, probably due to poor power supply stability.

But you can usually set it to disable new entities by default, and manually disable the old ones you don’t want.

Hey Andrew Jones,
it’s Andrew Jones here. @jamesmyatt is correct - outside of actual location services, like from Life360 or a mobile app or something, all your other device trackers are coming from your router integration, or your WiFi integration or nmap or the countless other integrations that are designed to basically list everything on the network.

@jamesmyatt / @mobile.andrew.jones you are both very correct. I mistakenly thought this was some recently added “new feature” in HA. Then I remembered that my unifi controller recently showed up as discovered device so I install the integration not realizing it would create a device tracker for every device on my network. I uninstalled it and they went away. Maybe I should have left it, then I would know when someone steals my TV… :crazy_face: