Download Phone Companion
Marylee Guffy
The first screen allows users to choose a type of mobile device that they own. Once the user has chosen, a second screen presents the user with information on some of the available apps. Under the listing for Windows phones, there is a link to view available devices.
On the Windows 10 Mobile screen, users are shown a list of apps that are already built-into their phone's system: Cortana, Photos, Groove, Movies & TV, OneNote, Skype, "Office" (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint only in this listing), and Outlook. Clicking on an icon in the list provides a description of what the app does. It is not clear why OneNote, Outlook, Sway, Delve, and Office Lens are not included in the Office category.
Phone Companion can detect when a phone or tablet is plugged into the PC and displays the name of the device and manufacturer. When a phone is plugged in, Phone Companion links to the transfer activity in Photos or the phone's storage location in File Explorer.
I have been playing with the thought of creating a companion gnome app for managing your phone. Sending and receiving messages, managing contacts, files and photos, even making calls. I even have thought of remote desktop for your phone in the app.
My idea is pretty straightforward: to make a companion computer from a broken Android phone. It has several obvious advantages over my current Orange PI lite 2 with ZTE LTE modem. A phone without a screen and a battery is much smaller and lighter.
There is a problem with the companion menu option inside of the home assistant app for phones period. I have been reading the forums and many, many people have raised this issue of sensors not updating over the past year however it still remains. Since this is a community driven project, this post is more for the end users pulling their hair out as to why their sensors on their phone do not update, sometimes update, update when they feel like it, etc.
This is most likely to do with permissions on the phones - manufacturers place a very high premium on battery life and Android apps get killed in different ways for different models. Samsung are notorious for this. Have you looked at the troubleshooting section of the docs?
Android has very different behavior depending on phone model and kernel, so it is almost impossible to test application for all different brands and models. To overcome this, big software companies build physical and/or virtual device farms and you can test the experience on different devices. I am sure we are not there in home assistant budget, so it would be very difficult to test all these on different devices and more probably debug them.
If all the phones have the same issue, yes it may be the app (because there is of course an android app and an ios app, maybe same code base but they are compiled differently) but it may also be the way they are connecting to your network as well. Do you run the home assistant app on them when you are not home and the results are the same, or - ?
Here is a quote from my original post " Nothing with home assistant is exposed outside of my network and it runs on http not https" My phones have no ability to talk with Home Assistant when I turn wifi off and vice vs.
It seems like your issue may be one thing in your network hadware/software communication. Maybe also try different network encryption protocols between your router and one of the phones to see if that makes a difference? (E.G., I did have an annoying hard to resolve hardware/networking connectivity issue which might be the same kind of thing with your situation. I had all manner of nightmare connectivity issues with a nest learning thermostat and changed the location of electronic devices near it as well as replacing the thermostat itself it and finally determined that either my router or the nest thermostat did not properly handle one of the more secure networking protocols - once I changed that all of those issues went away - )
Do you know anyone that lives nearby that would allow you to temporarily connect to their HA instance with the app on your phone when on their network, just to see if the sensors work properly then on the phone? If it does work that would prove it was not the phone itself (although maybe still an issue with the app) -
You posted quite a long rant - but if this is all you want, why not use a router based device tracker and be done with it? That will be the first to know if a phone connected to wifi, no companion app needed at all. I know the companion app has a huge list of sensors. But I cannot for the life of me figure what their use case is for 95% of them, other than pure data hunger.
But I do think relying on an app on the device to check if the device is home or not is conceptually flawed in this situation, because the phones are connected on local wifi only. The minute the phone goes of wifi the companion app has no way to notify to HA , so HA needs to assume the device is gone based on long time no updates or unable to reach the phone from HA. A simple ping sensor does just that - check if it can reach the phone. Also, the sensors on the phone are only trustworthy if the phone is home and connected to wifi, so you cannot rely on them for automations simply because they could be stale anyway.
This is only true if your instance is not remotely accessible. If it is then you can count on sensor updates to always come in when the app can phone home. If your instance is not remotely accessible then a lot of the desired functionality will not work as one would expect. In fact a user could be confused because notifications naturally come from Firebase so as long as your server has internet your phone can still receive the notification. A user could perceive that as all of the app should work but that is not the case when you see the logs
Link to Windows is an official Microsoft app that helps you keep a record of the Microsoft apps installed and upgraded in your smartphone. Basically, you can view a list of all the Microsoft apps for Android including: Skype, Swiftkey Keyboard, Office Lens, Outlook, Xbox, Wunderlist, among many others.
Link to Windows lets you sync your smartphone with a Windows computer. You can view your messages, sync contacts, make calls or see all the photos and videos stored in your Gallery. You can also keep your Microsoft apps up to date.
Using Link to Windows on your local network is safe. However, you must be careful when using it outside of your Wi-Fi network, as content sent and received between your computer and smartphone is not encrypted.
Does anyone know if it is possible to have the Zwift game running on your Android Tablet and the Companion on Android Phone? I have gotten the companion working and linking fine with my windows laptop running the Zwift game, but would prefer to run the game on my Huawei Tablet and the companion app on my phone - but so far have not been able to get this to work ie get the tablet (game) and phone (companion) to link. Has anyone gotten this tablet/phone combo working?
My wife and I were out hiking last weekend and at one point, we were confused with the signs and ended up taking the wrong direction of the track, which meant we were walking back rather than finishing the trail (which was a loop - we were at the southernmost point so both directions were heading north). My phone's GPS didn't help me as it had problems determining our position - all it did was telling us which direction we were heading, which I knew anyway.
So I started to research outdoor watches with built in GPS/Glonass/etc, assuming they would be more reliable in the wild outdoors. I stumbled over the Fenix 6, which seems gorgeous - but it's prohibitively expensive. And besides, while the map on the watch is probably as good as it gets on a watch, it still tiny compared to a map on a 6" screen smartphone. I also looked at the Instinct Solar, which is very compelling for its durability and battery life. While it has navigation, the map is obviously quite useless from the screen itself. It's really just a little black line plotting how you've hiked so far, with no other context.
Which leads to my question: when you're in an activity and the watch is connected to your phone, is it possible to see where you are on the map using the watch's location data? I read about LiveTrack, but my understanding is that that's for *other* people to follow my progress. Is there an easy way to "follow yourself" in a similar manner, using bluetooth (i.e. independently of a steady internet connection), so you can quickly pull up your phone to get a more detailed map and track of your hike when you need it?
In order to join your Zoom meeting from a mobile device or phone appliance, your account needs an audio conferencing plan add on: audio-plan This enables joining from the computer for video and screen share and the phone for audio only. It sounds like the feature you are mentioning is the ability to transfer your current Zoom meeting to your Zoom phone client (an app located on your mobile device) in case you need to leave your desk and cannot leave the meeting.
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