Universal Links, NFC & QR Tags

Support for these features is active under development and may not be fully released yet.

Feature		Android
NFC Tags	2020.5	2.2.0
QR Tags	2020.5	2.2.0
Old-Style	2019.1	Not Supported

NFC Tags & QR Codes

Home Assistant supports scanning tags as a trigger for your automations. Scanned tags are collected on the Tag Panel in Settings. This allows you to easily manage your used tags and give them friendly names.

A Home Assistant NFC tag or QR code contains a URL that will trigger the tag scanned event to be fired in Home Assistant. The format is a URL https://www.home-assistant.io/tag/<tag id> so that Android/iOS know to route this to our app. The app will extract the tag identifier and send it directly to your instance.

• bringing your device near an NFC tag or scanning a QR code will show a notification which, when tapped, will launch the app and fire an event.
• On Android, bringing your device near a Home Assistant NFC tag or scanning a QR code will fire an event.

The event which fires is the same on both iOS and Android: tag_scanned. For example, in automations, you can use the tag trigger to handle these events:

# for https://www.home-assistant.io/tag/50A3C7C8-1FE7-4BE8-8DC9-06E07D41B63D
automation:
- alias: Unlock the Door
  trigger:
    - platform: tag
      tag_id: 50A3C7C8-1FE7-4BE8-8DC9-06E07D41B63D
  action:
    # ...

Both apps support reading and writing NFC tags. You can use a randomly-generated tag value (like the above) or a custom one.

info

Some NFC tags are read-only and cannot be used as a Home Assistant NFC tag. Others may only allow one write before they turn read-only.

Writing NFC tags

You can write NFC tags by opening the app -> Settings -> Companion App -> NFC Cards -> Write.

Old-Style Universal Links

Universal links are a alternative to the URL Handler and X-Callback-URL.

The app has registered all URLs under https://www.home-assistant.io/ios/ as valid Universal Links. However, at this time, there is only one Universal Link that the app understands:

https://www.home-assistant.io/ios/nfc/?url=<a URL you could use with the existing URL handler>

What this allows for is NFC support. You can write a NFC tag with a NDEF URL like the above and whenever your device sees that NFC tag, a notification will appear for you to open the app with.

Once you open the app, it will do whatever action you told it to in the URL.

If multiple servers are connected to an iOS or mac app, you will be prompted to select a server when opening a universal link.