Zombie Home Assistant Cloud (Nabu Casa) Devices in Google Home/Assistant

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Hi, on the weekend I updated Home Assistant to 0.115, which included some recent breaking changes to the Broadlink integration. This required me to set up my Broadlink RM Pro and Mini devices again, and resulted in changes to the names of some switches which were associated with IR commands from the Broadlink devices. These switches were exposed to Google Home/Assistant via the cloud component and Nabu Casa.

Since the change in the name of the switches, the old switches have appeared as zombie or stale devices in the Google Home app, and I can’t seem to remove them. I’ve tried:

  • syncing devices in the Google Home app many times
  • restarting Home Assistant many times
  • unlinking the Home Assistant Cloud / Nabu Casa service from Google Home for all of the users in our household who had linked it
  • re-linking the Home Assistant Cloud / Nabu Case service to Google Home

Nothing I’ve tried is working. If I look at the device settings for the zombie devices, it has an option to “Unlink Home Assistant Cloud by Nabu Casa” but when I press this I get a polite message saying “Only owners can unlink”.

I’m stumped. If anyone has ideas about something else to try, I’d be very grateful for any suggestions.

2

Okay, I’ve partially solved this. It seems that I had an account that I had previously made a member of my (Google) home; that account had added the Home Assistant Cloud integration, and so the zombie devices belonged to that account. After removing that account from my (Google) home the zombie devices have disappeared from the Google Home app.

Catch is my Google Home devices (e.g., Home Mini, Nest Hub, etc) still seem to be caching the zombie devices in a list somewhere. If I issue a voice command via one of the Google Home devices it still tries to interact with both the new and the zombie device (meaning I get an error because it can’t reach the zombie device). If I browse the list of devices on the Nest Hub, neither the new or zombie devices appear. The way Google enables access to third-party devices seems frustratingly opaque.