Renaming my phone silently broke 26 notification references

Method

1. Found the problem during a read-only audit of Home Assistant on October 25, 2026, from the log's service-not-found errors, the automation definitions and the phone's device record.
2. Counted every reference to the old notify action in the automation file, including a blueprint input.
3. Replaced them all with one notify group that has the phone as its only target, then checked the log for errors with the old name after the change went live.

Setup

Phone app

The Home Assistant Companion app on an iPhone. Home Assistant names the phone's notify action after the device's name.

Automations

YAML automations that called the phone's notify action directly, plus one blueprint that took it as an input.

Evidence

My audit report of October 25, 2026, refreshed October 27, built from the Home Assistant log, the automation file and the device registry. Nothing was measured again for this note.

Results

The rename

The phone's device was renamed in the Companion app on October 24, 2026. Home Assistant builds the notify action from that name, so the old action stopped existing and a new one with a different name replaced it.

First failure

The first push failed 12 minutes after the rename. Home Assistant logged service-not-found errors, 23 of them in the first five and a half hours, but nothing on the phone showed that anything was wrong.

What was affected

26 references in the automation file: 18 automations called the old action directly and a 19th passed it as a blueprint input. Camera alerts, server monitoring, irrigation alerts, an overnight power alert, a storage temperature alert and website alerts did not reach the phone.

How long

The last error with the old name was logged on October 26, about 55 hours after the first failure. At the audit, 34 of the 47 open repairs in Home Assistant traced back to the rename.

The fix

One legacy YAML notify group with the phone as its only target, and every reference changed to call the group. If the phone is renamed again, only the group's single target line needs to change.

Going live

The group was created on October 25, but the automations were not reloaded then, so they kept calling the old action until Home Assistant restarted on October 26.

Afterwards

On October 27 the automation file had no uses of the old action and 26 of the group, and no error with the old name had been logged since the restart.

Failures

• Nothing alerted me. Failed notifications were only logged, and the alerts that would have reported problems were the ones failing. The problem was found the next day, during an audit.
• A separate alarm integration keeps its own notification settings outside the automation file. It still pointed at an older, removed phone registration and was fixed on its own on October 27 by naming the phone directly, so it will need changing again after another rename.
• A notify group created as a helper in the user interface makes a notify entity, not a notify action, so it could not stand in for the phone's action here. A YAML notify group was needed.
• This covers one phone and one rename. The 55 hours depended on when I happened to look, not on anything Home Assistant does.

Removed for privacy

• The phone's old and new names
• The notify action, group and automation names
• Clock times of the rename and the errors
• Other people's devices and notification targets

Without the names, a reader cannot match these errors to a specific log, but the pattern does not depend on them: any automation that calls a phone's notify action by name breaks when the phone is renamed.