Install and Configure the Home Assistant iOS App and Enable Notifications

The last part of this series covers setting up the Home Assistant iOS app and enabling notifications. Future posts about Home Assistant will be more ad-hoc now that I have most of my smart home requirements already in-place. This is the process I followed to get the app installed and connected with my Home Assistant setup based on the documentation:

1. Add the ios: entry to configuration.yaml
2. Restart Home Assistant
3. Install the iOS app and enter the URL (this would be the Duck DNS URL created when setting up remote access) and password for Home Assistant into the app settings
4. Enable notifications in the app settings
5. Restart Home Assistant again so it can detect the iOS app is connected
6. Home Assistant should now have new sensor entities for the battery status of the iPhone
7. Verify that notifications are working by triggering a test notification manually; do this by calling the notify service from the Developer Tools > Services page
   
8. A notification should appear on the iPhone; if there is a problem, try restarting Home Assistant and then restarting the app

With notifications enabled, you can send them via automations as-needed, just follow the documentation. The first notification I created simply lets me know when the garage door opens (this example is in my automations.yaml file). It even sends a live camera feed from a D-Link camera I have in the garage that I can view when I expand the notification using the data parameter:

- id: garage_door_opened
  alias: Garage Door Opened
  trigger:
    platform: state
    entity_id: binary_sensor.garage_door_tilt_sensor_sensor
    from: 'off'
    to: 'on'
  action:
    service: notify.ios_joshs_iphone_6
    data:
      title: "Garage Door"
      message: "Garage door was opened."
      data:
        push:
          category: camera
        entity_id: camera.garage_camera

I’ve since set up several additional notifications for other triggers around my house and they all work great! As an alternative, you could use PushBullet ,IFTTT, or others, but so far I like the Home Assistant app and it seems to work very well to support notifications.