FR: Wear data via phone app instead of direct connection

[Digicrat]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Difficulty in connecting WearOS App to HA. At home, it can only connect via IP address since WearOS disregards the local DNS. Outside using TailScale VPN, there is no way to extend that VPN access to the watch.

Describe the solution you'd like An option for the WearOS app to connect via the HA app on the phone as a bridge, instead of as a direct connection to a specified host. The Android APIs should allow the phone + watch apps to easily establish a TCP connection, at which point HA on the phone can simply act as a proxy for the watch (using the same connection settings it uses for itself).

Describe alternatives you've considered, if any I've considered SSH forwarding via termux as a proxy, but that doesn't seem workable either (at a minimum, I can't find a way to identify persistent IPs for the BT bridge to even test it).

[dshokouhi]

The watch already proxies via the phone without the app doing anything. Relying on sending data to the phone then having the phone send it will not be good. That data later constantly gets stuck and out of sync. That won't be a good experience for anyone. The best course of action is to update the network setup to work better with the existing connection. Connecting the watch is not painful for most users.

[Digicrat]

I'd be happy if there was an easier solution you can point me to (not involving using the premium cloud subscription option).

The watch is bridged to the phone's network connection, but not it's VPN (TailScale in my case).

At the moment:

• On my home WiFi network, both Phone and Watch work
• On cellular network with TailScale connected
  • Phone works, using the same hostname as on my home network
  • Watch is stuck on "loading entities". It doesn't even detect that it's 'away' to give me an option to connect to a different IP/hostname (if I even had a valid external one).

For reference, there are a fair number of users with this issue. Sharing data with the companion app on the phone seems like the simplest solution to handle VPN use cases.

The ideal solution would be if TailScale VPN could be directly run on WearOS, but I doubt that's going to happen anytime soon (and I'm sure that's not the only unique network setup that could benefit from a more direct linkage between phone and watch).

[pdecat]

The work-around to setup Home Assistant on the Wear OS watch is to set the local internal IP address in the Android phone companion app main IP address during the setup phase. After pairing, the main IP address can be restored to use the Tailscale IP in the Android phone companion app.