Add a "Notify person" action that targets all mobile devices assigned to a person

[jakal1989]

Describe the feature

Home Assistant currently allows sending notifications to individual mobile devices using the Mobile App notify services. However, there is no simple way to target a person entity directly.

I would like a new automation action, for example "Notify person", where the user only selects a person entity and provides the notification message.

The automation engine would then automatically deliver the notification to all mobile devices that are associated with that person.

This would remove the need to reference individual devices in automations and make notifications resilient when users add, remove, or replace their phones.

Use cases

• Send a notification to a family member without caring which devices they currently own.
• Notify all of a person's devices (phone, tablet, etc.) with a single action.
• Avoid updating multiple automations whenever someone replaces or adds a mobile device.
• Simplify blueprints by allowing them to accept a person instead of requiring device-specific notify services.

Current workarounds

Currently I have to call every individual notify.mobile_app_* service for each device that belongs to a person.

This means automations need to be updated whenever devices are added, removed, or renamed. It also makes blueprints and automations more difficult to maintain.

Anything else?

This would be similar to how Home Assistant already abstracts devices into person entities for presence detection. It would be useful if notifications could also use the person abstraction instead of requiring device-specific notify services.

The feature could automatically resolve all registered Mobile App notification targets for the selected person.

[TheFes]

The notify actions you mention are old-school nowadays. The mobile app integration creates a notify entity nowadays. The advantage of a notify entity is that you can simply target multiple entities in one action. You can also group them using a GUI created notify group helper. So you could group all entities belonging to the same person, allowing you to create a notify.person_name entity.

However, I would still see benefits of adding a notify entity to a person entity and allowing that person entity to be a target of the notify.send_message action. This would allow to send notifications to people in a certain zone, e.g. only send that the washing machine is finished to those persons who are at home and able to take action.

[santiagozky]

@TheFes still does not solve most of the issues of using the current setup. If my wife gets a new device, reinstall the app, change the name of their devices or install the mobile app in a new place (e.g. her laptop) she needs to explicitly tell me and then I need to go and adjust stuff in home assistant.

Even If I use groups I would need to go an add new entities to that group every time someone in my household changes something in their devices that triggers a new entity. This become frustrating after a while. (I currently have 10 repairs pending because she had to reset her phone. I have better things to do.)

When I maintain an automation I should not care where the user is using home assistant. I just need for them to get the notification. Home Assistant should allow me to just target users

[jakal1989]

The problem is that standard notify groups are not a replacement for mobile notify. When sending a notification through a notify group, mobile-specific options such as
clickAction
url
image
result in an error, while the same payload works when sent directly to a notify.mobile_app_* service. This makes it impossible to use notify groups for rich mobile notifications.