A suggestion for expanding the “Apps” trigger cards in Advanced Flows.
Currently there is only one When trigger card for Apps, and that is for a specified App only, when it crashes.
If you have many apps installed, but want to be notified, or perform other actions, when any app crashes… it seems a little excessive to have to create a flow for each and every app you have installed, and to have to add/remove such flows every time you add or remove an app. I can see the use case for a specified app crash trigger, but would also like to see a When trigger card for when any (unspecified) app crashes, and that card return the app Name as well as the Stack Trace. It would be useful when fault finding, and when reporting to an app developer.
Would it also be possible to add When cards for if/when an app started or stopped cleanly. Then you could set-up push notifications for apps you relied on for important tasks, to know if they stopped or crashed, without having to open the app and scroll through your installed apps list just to check.
Perhaps seemingly dumb ideas, but as someone with Asperger’s that absolutely has to check 2, 3, 4+ times that the door is locked… or that I absolutely turned the oven off… Such reassurances help greatly with my calm. And are one of the main reasons (as well as being mobility disabled) that I got in to home automation and Homey, because it’s meant to help and automate, and make life easier. I’m not completely crazy am I?
In the Device Capabilities app, I have a flowcard which triggers when an app is started and a And-flowcard to check if it’s started.
I suppose I could add another triggercard/whencard for when any app is started or stopped with the name and status in the tags. That’s what you mean right?
In the in-built When triggers, there is an “App ??? has crashed” card which has “Stacktrace” as a tagged result value. But you have to specify a specific app, rather than it triggering when any app crashes and returning the name of the app that crashed. So you have to know which app is likely to crash and write a flow for it, which seems a bit backwards to me.
But what you are suggesting does sound helpful, yes. At least then you would be able to tell if an app has started or stopped without your doing so specifically. (Then you could check the Apps page for that specific app to see if it shows the little red box of doom telling you it crashed, and run a Diagnostic Report which may help the developer of the app)
You’d think that if Athom can write that little red box of doom “crashed” flag in to the mobile application for any app that crashes, a When flow trigger card that tells you which app has crashed wouldn’t be a huge stretch.
But if you can do it in your app (which is excellent BTW… I only recently discovered it, but have found several uses for it already… marvellous work) that would be splendid 
I guess you’d need to allow a grace period after boot, before notifying of any apps starting or stopping, or you’d get spammed to death when you rebooted you Homey 
I’ve run into this so many times. It’s pretty annoying when a smart plug or a sensor stops responding just because its app crashed in the background, and you have no idea until you check the timeline or see the red icon.
Having a generic app crashed trigger with an app-name tag would save so much time. Right now, creating a separate flow for every single app just in case it fails is a mess.
That would be a nice thing to have indeed.
If it won’t (or can’t) be added to the flow cards, you could think of making a homeyscript that checks the status of the apps and put the app name that has crashed in a variable for example, which you can send to your timeline/message
Only side note on that one is that you have to trigger the script (every x minutes) to perform the check, because it won’t be triggered exactly when the app crashes..
I did look at the homeyscript… but my Java skills are distinctly lacking I’m afraid. And like you say, you’d have to run it on a timed loop as it wouldn’t trigger on an app crashing, which is a bit messy. Especially when the Homey OS already knows when an app crashes, to display the little red symbol of doom on the app and it’s devices.
I live in hope that someday these ideas may filter through and get implemented in Homey natively.
