The Home Assistant Companion app connects your phone to a Home Assistant server—not directly to each smart-home device. It can find a server on your home Wi-Fi, or connect to a URL you enter. To use it away from home, the server also needs a reachable remote-access route; installing the app alone does not make your server available online.
What the Companion app connects to
Home Assistant runs on a server in your home or elsewhere. The Companion app is a phone client for that server: it provides a dashboard connection, can report selected phone data such as battery or location, and can receive notifications from Home Assistant. Your connected devices communicate with the Home Assistant server through their configured integrations; the phone app is not a direct connection to every bulb, sensor, or other device.
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The current Getting Started documentation lists iOS 16.4 or later, Android 6 or later, and Home Assistant 0.104.0 or later as minimum requirements. These are documentation minimums, not a promise that every feature works on every device; app-store requirements and supported versions can change.
How to connect the app to your server
- Install and open the Home Assistant Companion app, then choose the option to connect to a Home Assistant server.
- If your phone and server are on the same local network, let the app search for servers and select the one it finds. Discovery depends on the devices being on the same network and on network configuration allowing discovery.
- If no server appears—or you are connecting from elsewhere—choose manual setup and enter the server’s configured URL. At home, this may be a local IP address or hostname. Away from home, it must be a reachable external URL or an enabled remote-access service.
- Sign in with your Home Assistant account credentials, choose a name for the phone, and grant only the permissions needed for the features you want. The device name identifies the phone’s entities in Home Assistant.
- Enable notifications if you want alerts from Home Assistant on the phone. Notifications are delivered to the registered app device through Home Assistant’s mobile_app notification platform.
The Companion app documentation describes onboarding and app setup. Permission prompts and menu labels can vary by operating-system and app version.
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How access works at home and away
At home: local connection
When the phone is on the same home network as the server, discovery may find it automatically. Alternatively, use the server’s local address. This route can work without making the server reachable from the public internet.
Away from home: a server-side route
For remote use, the Home Assistant server needs a route the phone can reach. The official remote access guide recommends Home Assistant Cloud as a secure option. A properly configured external HTTPS URL is another pattern; the networking documentation also covers using one public HTTPS hostname inside and outside the home or configuring separate internal and external URLs. Home Assistant Cloud may be useful in some network situations, including certain carrier-grade NAT setups.
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These approaches differ in setup and dependency: a public URL requires a correctly configured, reachable server route, while Home Assistant Cloud provides a managed remote-access route. Neither is created simply by installing the phone app. A VPN is one possible network architecture, not a requirement, and its behavior depends on platform and configuration.
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If Home Assistant has separate internal and external URLs configured, the Companion app can select between them based on network context. On modern iOS and Android, operating-system restrictions mean the app may need location permission to read the Wi-Fi network name (SSID) for this decision. That is distinct from sharing the phone’s geographic location for presence automations. The official troubleshooting guidance explains the Wi-Fi SSID permission issue.
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You can decline location sharing. If permission is denied or later removed, the location documentation says the app will not send location data. When location is enabled, it is sent to the Home Assistant instance directly or through Home Assistant Cloud, depending on the configured URLs; the documentation says it is not sent through other servers or organizations. See Location in the Companion app documentation.
Location permission is not a blanket requirement for using the app. Its need depends on the feature: identifying Wi-Fi context for URL selection or connection security is different from reporting location for automations. Sensor and permission behavior also differs between iOS and Android.
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Choose an encrypted connection
HTTPS protects the connection with encryption. An HTTP URL does not: Home Assistant’s security documentation says credentials and commands sent over HTTP are in plain text. Use HTTPS with a valid SSL certificate for remote access; do not expose an HTTP endpoint to the public internet. Home Assistant’s connection security documentation recommends HTTPS, especially for remote connections.
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What your phone can send—and what Home Assistant can send back
After setup, the app can create a device_tracker entity and provide phone sensors such as battery state and network information. Some sensors may be disabled by default; enable the ones you want in the Companion app’s settings. Sensor availability and update timing depend on the mobile operating system, permissions, and background restrictions, so do not expect continuous or instantaneous updates. The sensor documentation details platform differences.
For Android, the location documentation describes background location updates as typically occurring every 1–3 minutes in the documented mode, not as a guaranteed interval. It also states support for up to 100 geofences for app zone tracking. Actual behavior can depend on device, operating-system version, permissions, and power management. These figures are documented platform behavior, not service guarantees; see the location guide.
Home Assistant can send notifications to registered app devices, including actionable notifications where supported. The notification documentation explains setup and supported options.
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