Hello, I have been using openHab2 for 1.5 years and it has been great, however now I have implemented multiple installation(like in my garage, house, office) and I would like to access all of them from my phone without the need of switching logins, I was thinking of compiling 4 different apk’s with different names, however that hasn’t succeeded because the apps just update themselves. What do I need to change to have 4 apks, with different names installed on my phone? I have seen people use the regular and the BETA app for openHab however, I have more installations running. Or maybe there are other ideas?
I couldn’t find the post, but I think I read some days ago about synchronizing multiple openHAB installations…
Maybe this? Connecting distributed openhab instances but I am not 100% sure
I have seen a few solutions like this, but then another problem comes up, I don’t want to have everything in one, because I might give the office logins to my coworkers and I don’t want them being able to control my home.
Btw im running a custom installation of myopenhab.org on a virtual server.
Hmmm this would be more of a feature request for the app, right?
The use-case would be to switch between OH instances.
right now im thinking of compiling a different build variant
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What specifically do you need from the app that you can’t get from the browser UI?
Federating openHAB instances would not preclude this. Essentially you have one central OH that mirrors the Items and events from all the other openHAB instances. But this doesn’t have to be symmetric. The remote openHAB would share all it’s Items with the central OH but the central OH would not share any of it’s Items with the remote OH. Also, that doesn’t mean you can’t have the other openHAB instances remain with their own Rules, sitemaps and logins. All it means is that you can see and interact with them from one central openHAB.
Marketplace MQTT Event Bus is a better link for how to federate OH instances using the MQTT 2.5 binding. The other link uses the old MQTT 1.x binding.
This is a very necessary feature in an android application.
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I agree. Blue Iris allows you to connect from the splash screen into many instances, OH2 should be the same.
IMO OH2 needs alot of work around authentication/access control for this which is really lacks right now.
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Oh boy, yes.
it is really inconvenient to use the browser, it is way better for me to use an app
Welcome to the openHAB community Robin 
but… openHAB is not a printer 
your post seems to have zero context to this topic.
If it has tho, please describe your problem a bit better.
- Browse to your sitemap in Chrome on your Android.
- Tap the three dots in the upper right hand corner
- “Add to Home screen”
- Give it a name that makes sense
- Tap “Add automatically”
Now you have it on your home screen as if it were an app. It even opens in kiosk mode so it looks exactly like an app.
Seems a whole lot less inconvenient than anything else that has been suggested as a work around including installing multiple copies of the app somehow.
If they are on different networks and you don’t want remote access, you can give the hosts the same IP address or host name. Most routers set up dns names like openhab.local or openhab.
If you want to compile different flavors, look how it’s done for the beta version: https://github.com/openhab/openhab-android/blob/master/mobile/build.gradle#L71
Then run ./gradlew assembleFullGarageDebug, etc.
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i actually have compiled different versions of the beta app, and everything is working apart of notifications
What does the “Push notification status” on the about page say?
I’m also using 3 Raspberry’s - all on the same network - with each an Openhab installation. Each OH instance collects info and I use MQTT to get all items together.
At this moment I’m using one of them to test things out, to avoid breaking my main config.
Another vote for the ability to switch between servers. My use case is a primary home and a vacation home; I have a VPN linking the two sites together so I can’t use the same IP in each.
I’d be happy to be able to switch the app context (local server /remote server/) similar to how you switch between multiple Google accounts in gmail and other G apps.
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