Deprecate device tracker battery level attribute

[MartinHjelmare]

Proposal

I suggest we deprecate the battery_level state attribute for non legacy device tracker entities, ScannerEntity and TrackerEntity.

Background

The design of these entities were made before we started breaking out battery level measurements to separate sensor entities. Our current design standard says that a battery level measurement should be represented by a separate sensor entity with device class battery.

https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/core/entity/device-tracker

https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/core/entity/sensor#available-device-classes

Scope

Affected core integrations:

• gpslogger
• icloud
• mobile_app
• owntracks
• starline
• traccar
• tractive
• zha

Affected custom integrations:

?

Solution

• The battery level state attribute in the state_attributes property of the base class BaseTrackerEntity will be removed.
• The battery_level property in the ScannerEntity and TrackerEntity entities should be marked as deprecated and log a warning if used for a deprecation period. The deprecation period is done for custom integration authors.
• Affected integrations should be migrated by removing the battery_level property in ScannerEntity and TrackerEntity entities and replace it with a sensor platform with an entity with device class battery.

[dgomes]

mqtt integrations (such as z2m) are also affected

[MartinHjelmare]

I don't find where the mqtt integration sets the battery_level property for its TrackerEntity class definition. Do you have a link?

Note that we won't stop custom integrations from setting battery level as an extra state attribute. That's not part of the scope of this proposal.

[dgomes]

My bad, I understand now that this applies only to device_trackers, so no issue identified

[emontnemery]

Did you refer to how mqtt allows you to write any attribute?

[dgomes]

I just recalled that z2m entities have battery_level attribute

but since none of its entities are device_tracker's....

[frenck]

I think we should deprecate this; we are heading toward being 2 years after this architecture proposal; and this nowadays most certainly doesn't first our current design.

👍

../Frenck