Background: I used Tailscale for remote access to HA. It mostly worked well, but in the driveway the phone is half on cellular, half on wifi. The HA app keeps an old connection and hangs most of the time when I just quickly want to open the garage door. Kill, reopen, wait. That was annoying enough that I wrote something that fixes that over the weekend.
ha-iroh is a small Android app plus a HACS integration, built on iroh (p2p QUIC). Every phone has a keypair with HA, traffic is end-to-end encrypted, NAT hole punching is done automatically where possible, otherwise a relay is used that only sees ciphertext. Setup (one-time, first connection) is done by scanning a QR-Code.
There is no persistent tunnel. The app dials HA when you tap something and disconnects afterwards, so network switches don't matter and my in-front-of-the-garage-door wait is gone.
Features
- Device Controls in the Android power menu / quick settings: lights, switches, fans, climate, covers, locks, scenes, scripts, buttons, with live state
- Assist via quick settings tile or launcher shortcut (text only for now)
- the normal HA dashboard in a WebView, login once, any auth provider incl. MFA
- several HA instances in one app
- pairing by QR code from the HA config flow. Delete the device in HA and the phone is out
Not included, on purpose Sensors, location, notifications, widgets, Wear OS, iOS. I still use the official app for all of that. ha-iroh only covers quick control when I'm not home.
Status
- v0.2.x. I've not received any major bug reports yet, but DO expect rough edges. For me at least it currently works reliably enough.
- Android 12+, arm64 APK via GitHub Releases or Obtainium. Not on Play.
- HA 2026.3+, HACS custom repo. The integration starts a small Rust bridge as a subprocess, x86_64 and aarch64 bundled, so HA OS / Container / Supervised work.
- Optional: forward one UDP port and iroh connects directly always instead of sometimes via relay. Not required.
- Two HA settings to check, both in the README:
ip_ban_enabled(the bridge connects from localhost, so wrong passwords from one phone can ban 127.0.0.1, i.e. all phones) and never put loopback intotrusted_networks.
Disclosure
Large parts of this were built with an LLM. If that's a dealbreaker for you, this project is not for you.
Links
- Repo + install guide: https://github.com/pzeinlinger/ha-iroh
- MIT
- https://buymeacoffee.com/pzeinlinger
Bug reports welcome, especially from people behind CGNAT or on Fritz!Box / MikroTik.
Automation trigger: I go off my home WiFi SSID
Action: activate WireGuard vpn to my home.
Trigger: I join home WiFi
Action: disconnect WireGuard VPN
This solved my garage problems without an app.
nice! tried that too. does yours survive the handover? mine broke exactly there, phone grabs wifi at the gate, vpn drops, app stuck loading
It depends. If it hands over at just the right money I have to drag down the screen to make it refresh otherwise it’s fine.
It doesn’t affect me enough to prioritize fixing since I use CarPlay controls to control the garage door so it’s relating a request to the app rather than taking an input to a UI with stale expectations. I suspect an Android shortcut would respond the same way.