New device and new entities... Migration

[ocucek]

Describe your idea

Problem
In many households, Home Assistant automations rely heavily on mobile phone sensors and trackers
(Wi-Fi presence, device_tracker, geolocation, BLE, battery, etc.).
Whenever a family member replaces their phone, Home Assistant creates an entirely new device and new entities.

This causes all existing automations using old phone entities to break.
Users must manually update every automation, which is time-consuming, error-prone, and confusing.

Why this is a real-world issue

• People frequently upgrade their phones
• Each upgrade creates new entity IDs
• Automations stop working
• Families with multiple members spend hours fixing broken flows
• The current “Person” entity helps, but does not solve the migration problem

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Proposed Feature: User Mobile Identity Layer

Introduce a logical, persistent “User Mobile Identity” that links all phone-related functionality to the user instead of the physical device.

Key ideas:

1. Allow a user to replace their phone without breaking automations
   (“Replace device” → migrate all relevant entities to the new phone)

2. Allow entity mapping:

   • Old: device_tracker.old_phone
   • New: device_tracker.new_phone
   • Logical: person.mark_presence (unchanged in automations)

3. Optionally introduce a “mobile identity” group that aggregates:

   • location
   • Wi-Fi presence
   • BLE presence
   • battery
   • geocoded location
   • notifications

4. Automations should always reference the logical identity, not the physical device.

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Benefits

• Automations no longer break when someone gets a new phone
• Dramatically reduces maintenance in family households
• More intuitive user experience
• Aligns Home Assistant with other smart home ecosystems (Google Home, HomeKit, SmartThings), which already support device replacement/migration

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Conclusion
A “User Mobile Identity” system would eliminate one of the biggest pain points for families using Home Assistant and make automations far more robust and future-proof.

Thanks for considering this improvement!

Why is this exciting?

Help

Potential use cases

All

Anything else?

No response