Being tottaly new at this I constantly have questions about things that are apparently supposed to be intuitively obvious.
1 - When the ios app there is a white screen with a little wheel that revolves forever. Once it said something about the hubitat needing to be connected to the cloud.
2 - how does on connect to the cloud?
3 - Thr hubitat is promoted as being a local solution to home automation. How does requiring it to be connected to a cloud qualify this as being a "local" soltioon. I thought the whole point was to avoid the cloud completely.
I understand that if you wanr to control your home from afganistan, you may need a cloud but I see no reason that, when you're home, the app couldn't just connect to hubitat.local.
Maybe I'm missing something fundamental here, but based on my previous programming experience, I believe it is technically possible.
Anyway, so far getting the app has been just another time-waster unless someone can educate me about this.
In the upper right corner of the Hubitat mobile app will be a cloud icon or a house icon, if it shows the cloud it will look for the cloud version of the dashboard if it shows the house it will look for the local version, you can switch back and forth by clicking whichever icon shows up currently to switch to the other. It's supposed to auto detect but that doesn't always work.
You need the cloud for the initial registration but after that you only need it if you have devices connected that require the cloud like Echo or Chrome Assistants, or many wifi devices, if you want to use the new backup or remote services, if you want to have the hub send push notifications, or if you want to use your phones presence to trigger anything like home/away status.
You can also always access your Dashboards locally via a web browser and the hubs local IP as well.
Hi and thanks. The situation here is pretty grim. There is no icon at all in the upper right. When it starts there is a white screen with a spinning wheel. Going to tools, it discovers the hubitat at the correct ip address and then tries to do something. A horizontal bar moves about 1/10 of the way across the screen and then stalls. Ater a while it displays a generic safari can't connect message.
I would make sure both your phone and hub have access to the internet the first time you go into the app and if the app still fails maybe try uninstalling it and re-downloading it from the App Store again?
All of the automations run locally unless they need a cloud service, like Alexa or some third party integrations. The mobile app can connect to a cloud version of the dashboards so you still have access to them while not connected to your local network. But even if you can't connect your mobile app, all of the automations (with the exceptions I mentioned) will continue to run locally.
Just to expand a bit on this. The only functions one "needs" the mobile app for are push notifications, and a geofence to use for presence-based automations. Both of these functions naturally require an active connection to the internet.
But hub dashboards and admin pages can be viewed in any web browser, as @Terk mentioned.
Edit: there are also other solutions for receiving notifications and creating presence-based automations that don't rely on the Hubitat mobile app.
