Home Assistant and iPhone Critical Alerts Are a Match Made in Heaven

Some iPhone apps can use critical alerts to bypass your iPhone’s settings and play audible notifications even when your iPhone is in Silent mode or Do Not Disturb focus. Using Home Assistant, it’s possible to send bespoke critical alerts for any reason that you want.

What Are iPhone Critical Alerts?

Critical alerts are notification alerts that override your iPhone’s current notification settings. Even if your iPhone is in Silent mode or you have turned on Do Not Disturb, a critical notification is immediately delivered to your phone and plays an audible alert sound.

The purpose of critical alerts is to ensure that vital notifications are not missed or ignored. For example, if you have a water leak sensor set up in your Apple Home app, the app can send you critical alerts if a leak is detected, so that you don’t miss this crucial notification among all the other notifications you receive.

Triggering Critical Alerts From Home Assistant

Not all apps on your iPhone can send critical alerts. For an app to be able to do so, the developer must apply to Apple for an entitlement to use the feature and can only do so if Apple approves the request. This is to stop apps from sending you critical alerts for reasons that aren’t critical, such as asking you for a review.

The good news is that the smart home software Home Assistant is one of the apps that has the entitlement to send critical alerts. It means that if you have a Home Assistant server set up and the Home Assistant companion app installed on your iPhone, you can use Home Assistant to send critical alerts for whatever reason you want.

Credit: Adam Davidson / How-To Geek

Sending critical alerts to your iPhone using Home Assistant is simple to do using the Notify action. You set up your notification the same way as you would any notification sent to your iPhone, but you add two additional values under the “sound” data, which ensures that you always get an audible alert at full volume, even when your phone is on silent or in Do Not Disturb.

How to Send a Critical Alert From Home Assistant

There are multiple ways to trigger a notification in Home Assistant, but one of the most common is through an automation. By adding a couple of lines to your notification data in your automation, you can turn your standard alert into a critical alert.

Open an automation that you want to use to send a critical alert. In the “Then do” section, click the “Add Action” button. In the search field, type “notify” and select the “Notifications: Send a notification via mobile_app_your_phone_name” option. Enter the notification message in the “Message” field. In the data field, enter the following:

        push:
  sound:
    name: default
    critical: 1
    volume: 1
    

Now, when your automation is triggered, a notification will be sent to your iPhone and will play the default critical alert sound at full volume, even if your iPhone is muted. It’s also possible to use the “interruption-level: critical” syntax to make a notification critical, but the reason for using the “sound” method will become clear later.

Triggering Critical Alerts Via Shortcuts

Another major benefit of being able to send critical alerts using Home Assistant is that it makes it possible to send critical notifications directly from iOS shortcuts. Currently, it’s not possible to send a critical alert using the Shortcuts app with any of the native actions. However, using the Home Assistant actions, you can use the Shortcuts app to trigger critical alerts whenever you want. For example, you could create your own panic button shortcut that would send a critical alert to someone else’s phone when you tapped a widget or pressed the Action button.

To send a critical notification in a shortcut, tap “Search Actions,” enter “Home Assistant,” and select the “Call Service” action. Tap “Service,” and select the “notify.mobile_app_persons_phone_name” action.

Tap the arrow and then “Choose” to select your Home Assistant server. Tap “Service Data” and enter the following:

        {
"message": "[your message]",
  "data": {
    "push": {
      "sound": {
        "name": "default",
        "critical": 1,
        "volume": 1
      }
    }
  }
}

    

Toggle “Show When Run” off.

Now whenever your shortcut is triggered, it will send a critical notification to the mobile device you selected (including your own if you select it).

Using Different Notification Sounds for Different Alerts

One downside of critical alerts is that, by default, they all make the same sound. You can’t tell just by the alert sound whether it’s a critical alert from one of your apps or a critical alert you’ve sent from Home Assistant. Originally, the alerts from my medication reminder app sounded the same as all my Home Assistant alerts.

The good news is that it’s possible to choose from a wide variety of system sounds for your Home Assistant critical alerts, so that you can immediately tell what the alert is for without even looking at your phone. You can even upload your own custom sound files to use as the sound for your critical alerts. The system sounds aren’t included by default in the Home Assistant companion app; you’ll need to import them first if you want to use them.

Open the Home Assistant app on your iPhone and tap the menu icon in the top left corner. Scroll down and select “Settings.” Select “Companion App.” Tap “Notifications,” and select “Sounds.” Select the “System” tab and tap “Import system sounds.”

To add a custom sound (which must be saved as a 32-bit float, 48000Hz WAV file), save it to the iCloud section of your Files app. Select the “Imported” tab and tap “Import custom sounds.” Select the sound from the Files app. Once you have imported system sounds or custom sounds, restart your iPhone.

To use any of the system sounds, replace “default” in the “name” section of your notification data with the name of the sound, including the file extension. For example, to use the “Noir” system sound, you would replace “name: default” with “name: Noir.caf”, ensuring that you match the case of the file name. This is why I used the “sound” option earlier, rather than the “interruption-level” method.

The “data” section of the Notify action would then look like the following image:

How I Use Critical Alerts

I use critical alerts in several of my Home Assistant automations. For example, I have an automation that alerts me when the price of my electricity (which changes on a half-hourly basis) rises above a specified level. Once I get the alert, I know not to use power-hungry devices such as the dryer until the price has dropped back down again. Without the audible critical alert, I would regularly miss these notifications until it was too late.

I also have an automation that sends me a critical notification when my smart smoke detector detects smoke or CO in my home. It means that even if I’m away from home, I get a loud audible notification that alerts me that there is smoke or CO detected in my home. Thankfully, I’ve never had this alert go off yet.

By far my favorite use of critical alerts, however, is a simple shortcut that I created to solve a constant source of frustration. Many times, I would message my wife, or she would message me, asking for some time-critical information, and we would miss the notification completely. For example, I might message her from the grocery store asking if there was anything else we needed, and she would only reply after I was halfway home.

We both now have a shortcut on our phones that we can run from a widget in the Today View. It opens a text entry field where we can type a message, then sends that message to the other person’s phone as a critical alert. We no longer miss important messages from one another, and a regular source of frustration no longer exists.

Critical alerts can be really useful, but many apps aren’t able to use them, and even Apple’s own Shortcuts app won’t allow you to use critical alerts. With Home Assistant, however, you can send critical alerts for whatever reasons you want. By selecting different sounds, you can even tell what the alert is about without having to look at your phone. It’s a real game-changer.