Ticker — Smart Notification Management for Home Assistant

[iron geode]

I’ve had Home Assistant running for a few years now and over time it’s grown into a pretty extensive setup — lots of automations, notifications, custom templating. One thing that always bugged me was how notifications are handled. Change your phone, add a tablet with the HA app, and suddenly you’re digging through automations to find every notify.mobile_app_* call that needs updating. Who gets what notification is scattered across dozens of automations with no central place to manage it.

I’m not sure how many people run into this, but it was a recurring annoyance for me, so I decided to build something to fix it. The result is Ticker, a custom integration I’ve been working on and wanted to share. Ticker replaces all of that with a single ticker.notify service. Your automations declare what happened (a category like security or deliveries), and Ticker routes notifications to the right people based on their subscription preferences and location.

Features
Different subscription modes
Queue system
Per-category device routing
Automatic service discovery
Admin & user panels
Notification logging
Migration wizard

Installation
HACS (custom repository for now)
Open HACS → Integrations
Three dots menu → Custom repositories
Add https://github.com/analytix-energy-solutions/ticker, select Integration
Search for “Ticker” and install
Restart Home Assistant
Settings → Devices & Services → Add Integration → Ticker
A PR for the HACS default store has been submitted.

[silk umbra]

Oh hey, I’ve been working on this same thing. Sounds like you beat me to it.
Mine works, but it’s not ready to share with others yet. (Working out some bugs)
I’ll have to give this a try and see how it compares.

[iron geode]

Cool! Let me know what you think! I'd love to get some feedback!

[iron geode]

Quick update: v1.2.0 was just released, adding advanced conditions and a per-category sensor entity that exposes the last 10 messages. Happy Notifying!! For more info see the community forum: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/ticker-smart-notification-management-for-home-assistant/992834

[silk umbra]

So, I finally got around to installing it. I like how you handle zones, plus being able to queue messages is brilliant.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to do much with it since it decided that my Ipad is the connected service even though under my user in HA it has my phone. The Ipad wasn't even listed for my user when I installed it.
My Wife's user in Ticker shows "No services"

I don't see a way to fix this in the user interface. How does it decide what is the appropriate device?

[iron geode]

Thanks for the kind words! What you're describing is a bug in device discovery I addressed today actually. Ticker's matching logic had a flaw that could cause it to either pick the wrong device or find nothing at all for some users. This is fixed in v1.2.1, which was made available just now. After updating the correct devices should be discovered automatically. Let me know if it sorts itself out!

[knotty bridge]

I'm far from a power user but when I saw notifications from ha had to be specified to a single device my first thought was that it was going to be painful to add all relevant devices per automation and also keep them updated. From the description here this sounds like something that'll be really useful to avoid that pain

[iron geode]

I think it is 😋 Feel free to give it a whirl and let me know if you like it!

[lost lion]

my solution has always been a group and all automations use the group instead, then I can add/change devices whenever

zone based notification is pretty neat though, usually the automations handle that, going to see how I might change them

[calm slate]

Very interesting integration! I currently use a script to define notification routes. It works great for 2 users (our kiddo is too young for her own mobile) but won't scale well and I really like in Ticket that users can define when they want to receive their messages and also the queue.

I have one conditional route that I would like to keep:

• send notification to userX, if userX is home
• otherwise, if userY is home, send it to userY
• if no one is home, send it to userX

Would that be possible with Ticker's conditions? If not I could work around that with a mix of my script and Ticker or just use the queue.

Use case for that are notifications for our washing machine. My wife usually handles cleaned clothes, but if she's not home but I am, then I do that (to avoid clean but smelly wet clothes). If we're both not home, she should get a notification.