For Home Assistant enthusiasts that are also in the Apple ecosystem, the holy grail has always been full two-way control of your iPhone (or iPad and Mac) and Home Assistant. For the longest time you’ve been able control Home Assistant from your iPhone, but not the other way around. Until now. With iOS 27, iPadOS 27 and macOS 27, Apple has opened up the ability to control your Apple devices from Home Assistant via Shortcuts. This is a game changer. If you are on the ’27 beta train, you must be using developer beta 5 or later. In previous versions key functionality was broken.
Full Two-Way Shortcut Automation
For a long time the Home Assistant Companion app for Apple devices has exposed a lot of functionality to directly control your Home Assistant instance. Actions include activate scenes, control fan/lights/switches, perform action, press buttons, run scripts, trigger automations, and more. You could then easily create Shortcuts to automate these actions to control your smart home. Using Shortcut triggers you could even automate these actions, such as when you arrive home.
Recently I wrote two articles, centered around focsus modes, that show you the power of Shortcuts controlling your smart home:
Perfect Shortcut Focus Mode Tracking for iOS 27 and iPadOS 27
Home Assistant: iOS Focus Mode Automations (2027 Edition)
What feature did Apple add to the ’27 OS family that allows Home Assistant to now control your Apple devices? It actually boils down to a very simple new Shortcuts automation trigger: “When I receive a notification from“. And what unleashes the true power is the fact that you can add up three notification filters: Message, Title, Subtitle.
Combine this with the Home Assistant Companion app, and now you can control your iPhone/iPad/Mac from Home Assistant by merely sending custom notifications to your Apple device that can do anything a Shortcut can do. By using the custom notification filters, you can now send any custom text notification to your Apple device and it will trigger a Shortcut automation. Best of all, is that these Shortcut triggers can run in the background even if your device is locked.
Configuring Home Assistant Notifications
In order to control your Apple devices we need an easy way to send Home Assistant Companion notifications. My preferred method is to use a blueprint by the famous Home Assistant community member, Blacky. His blueprint is called “State Notifications & Actions” allows you easily send custom notifications to the Home Assistant Companion app.
In this example I’ll use a silly example just to show you power of what’s possible. I’ll turn on my office monitor light which will then turn on the travel focus mode on my iPad (which syncs to all of my Apple devices). The same thing would work with your iPhone or Mac.
This is the sequence of events:
- Configure the “State Notifications & Actions” blueprint in Home Assistant to trigger when my Office monitor light turns on.
- Write an Apple Shortcut automation that triggers on notifications from the Home Assistant Companion app. I filter on the message body containing “Travel on”.
- The blueprint will send a notification to my iPad with the title “Notification” and a message of “Travel on” when I turn on my office monitor light.
- Even with the screen locked, the travel focus mode will be turned on. All other Apple will follow the same focus mode change.
State Notifications & Actions Blueprint
Blacky’s blueprint is highly customizable. The Blueprint has so many options that I can’t possibly cover them all in one post. So I’ll just stick to the very basics to get you started. First, we need to configure the Start Trigger section.
For this example the trigger very simple. I selected the “on” state trigger, then selected my Office Monitor light.
Next we need to configure the device to notify and the title and message. Here I selected my iPad Pro M5, but it will work with your iPhone and Mac as well. As we will see when I configure the Shortcut trigger, I’m only filtering on the “Message” field by using the “Contains” filter. For aesthetics I suggest using a Title, such as Notification. The Message field is where you can enter your custom message that the Shortcut will trigger on. Here I used ‘Travel on’. Do take note that you can’t just send a notification with just the Title. At a minimum you need content in the Message field.
No other settings are required in the blueprint, so I won’t cover them here. But Blacky has given us a ton of options to customize the notifications.
Shortcut Configuration
Configuring the Shortcut is very straightforward. You can do this on any OS ’27 device, including iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.
- Go into the Shortcuts app, tap Automations, tap +, then tap Edit.
- Scroll down the Apps section, then tap Notification.
- Tap App, then select Home Assistant app
- Tap Add Filter.
- Tap Title and change it to Message.
- Tap on Body and enter the text string that matches your notification message field. Does not appear to be case sensitive.
- In the action search bar type ‘focus‘ and select ‘Set Focus‘.
- Tap Do Not Disturb and select your desired focus mode.
- Tap ‘Off‘ and change it to ‘On‘.
For this example all I have to do is now turn on my office monitor light. When I did that, instantly I saw the Home Assistant notification on my iPad, and as you can see, the Travel focus mode was turned on.
Summary
Apple has unleashed a whole new level of automation with their ’27 OS family and Shortcuts automation triggers. We are now able, directly from Home Assistant, to send notifications to our Apple devices and have them trigger any local actions that a Shortcut can perform. In my silly example I use the state change of my office monitor light to trigger a focus mode change on my iPad, which then synced to my iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch. By modifying the notification message body you can trigger an infinite number of unique actions.
