Hi all, happy 2018! It’s been a very busy year for me thus far, apologies for being quiet until now.

As some of you must know by now, the iOS 12 feature list has been announced and Apple is planning to release quite a few new enhancements that I hope to take advantage of.

These include:

Critical Alerts. As a user, you will be able to mark an alert as “critical” which will cause the alert to bypass any silence or do not disturb settings. I’ve requested permission for this from Apple already and will announce its availability shortly thereafter. I believe that I won’t need to release a new version to let you take advantage of it

Notification grouping. Lucky for you, I won’t need to release a new version! You can start using this feature now (those of you on iOS 12 already that is) by sending thread-id as a parameter just like you do for specifying a sound . If you’re looking for a way to try this out, might I suggest setting the thread-id to an entity ID so that notifications concerning that entity are grouped together. Without setting a thread-id all notifications from the app will be placed into a single group

as a parameter just like you do for specifying a . If you’re looking for a way to try this out, might I suggest setting the to an entity ID so that notifications concerning that entity are grouped together. Siri Shortcuts… I’ll know how this can get implemented and what the possibilities are once the Shortcuts app is available, but obviously would be great to get support for it so you can control Home Assistant and send data via Siri (and hopefully this would allow support for HomePod as well!)

That’s about it for iOS 12 stuff! I expect i’ll push a release or two before iOS 12 is publicly available with some small bug fixes.

Now, for the bad news for a very very small number of you: Once iOS 12 is publicly available, Home Assistant for iOS will no longer be available for iOS 9. Trust me, it’s a VERY small number of you. But, fear not, since you will get at least 1 more bug fix update before we say goodbye, and even with the iOS 12 changes you aren’t missing much.

As always, would love to get some more developers to help out with development! Maybe then y’all can get more than just a few releases a year out of me .

Thanks for listening!