Advanced notifications without Controller for HomeKit

A few months ago, Emilio Cano, Emilcar, threw us a question about how to get notified if you left a window or door open for a long time. I’ll leave you the links to episode 44 and to episode 45 of the podcast. The solution I gave Emilcar at the time involved using Controller for Homekit in its paid version, which is the one that includes the Advanced Notifications feature. This feature consists of a server that gives you a URL to call from Shortcuts, so you can say ‘When this bulb turns on, call this URL’ and Controller’s server sends a push notification to your device with whatever text you’ve configured. The truth is that this feature is really interesting because, from Apple’s native Home app, you can’t get a notification sent when a bulb turns on, for example, or when the temperature drops below 19 degrees. You can get notifications when a door opens, for instance, but there are other useful alerts you can’t easily set up. Emilcar’s example is very simple, he just wanted to get a notification if a window had been open too long… well, that just can’t be done without some spellcasting or third-party apps, not even with a plain Shortcut. It’s clear that Controller For HomeKit can solve this, but there are 2 things about it that aren’t great… the first is the price, since the folks at Controller have kept raising the app’s price as they’ve added more features. I remember buying it years ago with the lifetime payment option, and it cost me €39, but now the one-time lifetime payment is up to €100! And if you pay monthly or yearly, it’s not much cheaper either… when you’d think this isn’t an app you need to open every day; once you’ve set up your automations, notifications and configurations, you don’t need to open it again, and you can manage all your devices from the Home app in a much simpler and more visual way. And the second thing is that you’re relying on a ‘third-party’ server, that notification leaves your local network to reach your device. If the folks at Controller’s server stops working, then you’re left without a notification.

Pushover

So today I’m bringing you an alternative for notifications, a service called Pushover. On top of that, Pushover is a more versatile alternative than Controller For HomeKit for notifications, since it lets you set up push notifications for pretty much anything, not just Home devices… imagine, for example, you have an automation in IFTTT, well, you can have it send a push notification to your phone, or when someone makes a commit on GitHub for a project you follow, or when one of the shows we watch releases a new episode… and of course we can integrate it with our devices the same way we do with Controller for Homekit, meaning Pushover will give us a user token, we’ll register our device and an app, which will generate a URL for us. Then we’d need to create the Shortcut on our device so that, for example, when a bulb turns on, it does a Get URL action, and in that URL we plug in the data provided by the Pushover folks. Even though it’s a cheaper solution than Controller for Homekit, it’s not free. Pushover costs €5 per account, and if you want to send alerts to someone else’s device, they need their own account and have to pay another 5 bucks, which isn’t great at all. You can then create distribution groups, but each person still needs their own account. That said, the €5 plan lets you send 10,000 messages a month, about 330 messages a day… which should be more than enough to find out you left the window open! Also, these are simple notifications, you can’t set up actions to show up when you tap on the notification. Once again Controller for HomeKit keeps winning here… but remember that you’re not paying for Controller just for the notifications, you’re also getting the whole network maintenance side, which I’ve talked about many times before and which lets you do handy things like backing up your automations, storing the pairing QR codes for your devices in case you lose the sticker, or telling you which of your automations hasn’t run in a while and why.

What if we use Home Assistant as a notification server?

Those of you who have Home Assistant as a bridge but use the Home app because you have a lot of HomeKit-compatible devices are probably already setting up automations and firing notifications from Home Assistant, because it’s much simpler and there’s no limitation whatsoever. From Home Assistant you can create ‘clickable’ notifications just like Controller for HomeKit’s, without having to pay for the app or for the Pushover service. Also, the more I learn about Controller’s notification server and Pushover’s features, the more I think what’s behind them is basically a tweaked Home Assistant that they charge you to use. Home Assistant can even be integrated with Telegram, so you get push notifications straight in the Telegram app and can even reply to the bot with the action tied to that notification! It’s wild. That said, doing this means giving up one of Home Assistant’s great perks, having everything local, because if your internet connection goes down or Telegram gets blocked like it recently did in Spain, then you’re left without notifications. The thing is I’ve been looking into whether I can use Home Assistant as an internal notification server, meaning, doing with my local Home Assistant the same thing these apps do, having it give me a URL to call from a Shortcut… and it can be done using the Home Assistant API, but I still haven’t managed to get it working. Mind you, it’s really just a proof of concept, since I could just generate that notification directly from Home Assistant with no hassle at all because I have the devices on both platforms, but you know how much I like to tinker. If anyone’s pulled off this pointless stunt that honestly doesn’t make much sense, let me know so I can see where I’m going wrong. To sum up, if what we’re after is getting those notifications we can’t create directly from the Home app, it’s clear Pushover is much cheaper… but if we want an app to help us build automations, advanced notifications that are also clickable and can have several actions attached, or to manage our Home devices, then you’d better start saving up and go pay for Controller.