ticker

Smart notification management for Home Assistant.

Ticker replaces scattered notify.mobile_app_* calls with a single ticker.notify service. Your automations declare what happened, and Ticker routes notifications to the right people based on their subscription preferences, location, time of day, and device state.

Installation

HACS

1. Open HACS, go to Integrations
2. Three dots menu - Custom repositories
3. Add this repository URL, select Integration
4. Search for "Ticker" and install
5. Restart Home Assistant
6. Settings - Devices & Services - Add Integration - Ticker

Manual

1. Copy the ticker folder into custom_components/
2. Restart Home Assistant
3. Settings - Devices & Services - Add Integration - Ticker

Quick start

Once installed, Ticker adds two sidebar panels: an admin panel for managing categories and users, and a user panel for subscriptions, queue, and notification history.

Create a category in the admin panel (e.g., "Security"), then replace your existing notify calls:

# Before - one call per person, per device
- service: notify.mobile_app_johns_phone
  data:
    title: "Motion Detected"
    message: "Front door camera"
- service: notify.mobile_app_janes_phone
  data:
    title: "Motion Detected"
    message: "Front door camera"

# After - one call, Ticker handles routing
- service: ticker.notify
  data:
    category: security
    title: "Motion Detected"
    message: "Front door camera"

Each person controls how they receive each category - always, never, or conditionally based on zone, time, or entity state. The admin panel includes a migration wizard that scans your existing automations and helps convert them.

For the full feature guide, see USER_GUIDE.md.

Key features

• Single service call replaces all individual notify.mobile_app_* calls
• Three subscription modes - Always, Never, and Conditional with zone, time, and entity state rules
• Smart queuing - notifications queue when conditions aren't met and deliver automatically when they are
• Notification actions - configure action buttons per category (script, snooze, dismiss) with full lifecycle tracking (v1.3.0)
• Per-user snooze - suppress a category's notifications temporarily without touching any automation (v1.3.0)
• Inline images in history - camera snapshots and notification images displayed directly in the History tab (v1.3.0)
• Device recipients - send notifications to shared devices (TVs, speakers, tablets) independently of household members, with TTS and push support (v1.4.0)
• Critical notifications - single critical: true flag translates to platform-specific critical alert payloads on both iOS and Android (v1.4.0)
• Alarmo and blueprint compatibility - Ticker registers as a standard notify.ticker service, discoverable by Alarmo and any integration scanning for notify services (v1.4.0)
• AND/OR condition grouping - Mix AND and OR logic in the conditions builder with up to two nesting levels. Existing conditions migrate automatically (v1.5.0)
• Automations Manager - Admin tab that surfaces every automation and script using ticker.notify with inline editing, no automation editor required (v1.5.0)
• Action Sets Library - Reusable action button sets managed from a central library tab, referenced by ID from any category (v1.5.0)
• Smart notification management - Auto-grouping, auto-tagging, sticky/persistent flags, and ticker.clear_notification service injected automatically at delivery time (v1.5.0)
• Notification navigation target - navigate_to parameter on ticker.notify deep-links to any HA panel on notification tap, with a live navigation picker in the admin panel (v1.5.0)
• Multi-category fan-out - category field accepts a list of category IDs so a single ticker.notify call can target multiple categories at once (v1.6.0)
• Auto-clear triggers - clear_when parameter on ticker.notify auto-dismisses persistent notifications when an entity state or event trigger fires (v1.6.0)
• History search and filters - full-text search with category and date-range filters in the user History tab, plus clickable status filters on the admin Logs tab (v1.6.0)
• Expired notification visibility - queued notifications that expire before delivery now appear in History as faded entries so users know what they missed (v1.6.0)
• History management - delete individual entries or clear your own history from the user panel, per-row deletion for admins (v1.6.0)
• Blueprint device target - Ticker registers as a Home Assistant device so it shows up in blueprint device pickers (v1.6.0)
• Device routing - global device preference plus per-category overrides
• Notification history - grouped by notification call, with deep-link from phone notifications
• Dashboard sensors - sensor.ticker_<category> entities for Lovelace integration (v1.2.0)
• Migration wizard - scan and convert existing automations
• Self-healing delivery - failed deliveries retry automatically before falling back

AI Disclosure

This integration is being developed with AI assistance.

Version history

v1.6.0

• Notification history search — full-text search bar in the user History tab, plus category dropdown and date-range filters. Filter state resets on tab switch or panel close.
• Log Filter by Status — stat counters on the admin Logs tab (Total, Sent, Queued, Skipped, Failed, Snoozed, Expired) are now clickable and filter the log list to the selected outcome.
• Expired notification visibility — notifications that expire in the queue before delivery are logged with a dedicated "expired" outcome and shown as faded entries in user History and admin Logs. A periodic sweep checks for expired entries every 15 minutes.
• Multi-category fan-out — ticker.notify category field now accepts either a single category ID or a list. Each listed category gets its own notification_id and goes through the full per-category delivery pipeline.
• Auto-clear triggers — new clear_when parameter on ticker.notify accepts an entity-state or event trigger. Ticker registers a one-shot listener per delivered notification and calls ticker.clear_notification automatically when the trigger fires. (Listeners do not survive HA restart.)
• History management — per-entry delete buttons on the admin Logs tab and per-group delete on the user History tab, plus a user-scoped "Clear History" button. Legacy entries without a notification_id are gracefully skipped.
• Blueprint-friendly device — Ticker now registers itself as a Home Assistant device with entry_type=service, so it shows up in blueprint device pickers. Blueprints still call notify.ticker as the service; device-action support is deferred to a later release.
• Per-category sensor privacy flag — new expose_in_sensor category flag (default on) controls whether raw notification title and body are included in the category sensor's extra attributes. Turn off for sensitive categories such as 2FA codes or medical reminders.
• Improved security — navigate_to is now validated as a relative HA path (rejects https://, javascript:, //-protocol-relative, and paths containing control characters), condition trees validate leaf semantics against the HA state machine, and notification titles are no longer logged at INFO level.
• 19 bug fixes across conditional notification gating (post F-2b migration), zone rule evaluation, condition listener lifecycle, queue retry expiration, bundled log correlation, and the Persistent toggle in the category Smart sub-tab (GitHub #25).

v1.5.2

• Fixed: adding a new device recipient (TTS or Push) always failed with expected dict for dictionary value @ data['conditions']. Got None when the Conditions tab was left empty. No device recipients could be created.

v1.5.1

• Fixed: "Copy YAML" in the Migration Wizard crashed in the HA Companion App and non-HTTPS contexts (Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'writeText')). The YAML fallback dialog now works correctly in all environments (GitHub #19).

v1.5.0

• AND/OR condition grouping — the conditions builder now supports mixed AND/OR logic. Toggle the operator pill between conditions, or group adjacent conditions into a sub-group with its own operator. Up to two nesting levels. Existing flat conditions migrate automatically.
• Automations Manager — a new Automations tab in the admin panel surfaces every automation and script that uses ticker.notify, with inline editing of category, title, message, and more without opening the automation editor.
• Action Sets Library — action sets are now a first-class resource managed from a dedicated library tab rather than embedded inside individual categories. Any category can reference a shared action set by ID.
• Smart notification management — per-category auto-grouping, auto-tagging for replacement, ticker.clear_notification service, and persistent/sticky status notifications, all injected automatically at delivery time.
• Notification navigation target — a navigate_to parameter on ticker.notify deep-links to any HA panel when a notification is tapped. The admin panel includes a live navigation picker populated from the sidebar panel registry.
• Bug fixes: iOS delivery incorrectly stripped image data from notifications (regression in v1.4.0); queued single-entry notifications discarded all original data fields on delivery.

v1.4.0

• Device recipients — send notifications to shared devices (TVs, speakers, wall tablets) independently of household members. Admins manage devices in a new Devices tab. Supports push (rich or plain) and TTS delivery with announce mode, snapshot/restore, and configurable resume behaviour.
• Critical notifications — pass critical: true on ticker.notify and Ticker injects the correct platform-specific critical alert payload automatically (iOS bypasses DND; Android uses high-priority FCM).
• Alarmo and blueprint compatibility — Ticker now registers as a standard notify.ticker service. Any integration or blueprint that scans for notify.* services can find and use Ticker directly.
• Configurable category defaults — admins can set the default subscription mode (Always / Never / Conditional) per category, so new users start with the right preference instead of always receiving everything.
• Bug fixes: admin log timestamps truncated on mobile, device cards losing controls on mobile with long names, log list capped at 100 entries while stats showed 500, discovery cache storing empty results on startup.

v1.3.2

• Fixed: saving category from Default Mode or Actions sub-tab no longer fails with "Name required" (BUG-049)

v1.3.1

• Added AI disclosure section to the README.

v1.3.0

• Notification Actions & Workflows - configure action buttons per category (script, snooze, dismiss). Ticker listens for button taps and routes them automatically - no second automation required.
• Per-user snooze - tapping a snooze button suppresses that category for the configured duration for that person only, without touching any automation.
• Inline images in History - notifications with a data.image field now show the image inline in the user History tab.
• Action taken recorded in admin logs and user history.
• Bug fixes: stray HTML entities in migration wizard output, disabled users counted as subscribers, improved Companion App notify service discovery.

v1.2.1

• Hotfix for mobile_app Companion App notify service discovery - services were not found on fresh HA installs because legacy notify.mobile_app_* services are not registered in the entity registry.

v1.2.0

• Advanced conditional rules: time windows and entity state conditions in addition to zones.
• Category sensor entities (sensor.ticker_<category_id>) for dashboard integration.
• Internal refactoring: store, websocket, and arrival handling split into smaller modules, all files under 500 lines.

v1.1.0

• Notification grouping in History tab - entries from the same ticker.notify call grouped into a single card with device tags.
• History badge count reflects grouped notifications.

v1.0.0

First public release with complete notification management: category routing, three subscription modes with advanced conditions, smart queuing with bundled delivery, self-healing retries, per-user device routing, notification history with phone deep-links, auto-discovery, admin and user panels, and migration wizard.

Uninstalling

Update any automations using ticker.notify before removing. Then delete the integration from Settings - Devices & Services. Removing Ticker deletes all its data - categories, subscriptions, queue, and logs.

License

GPL-3.0

Support Ticker

If Ticker is useful to you, consider sponsoring development via GitHub Sponsors. It helps keep the project active and growing. Join our Discord server to find out more and get support: https://discord.gg/NCcG4GpP