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The Grocy Android app

The final layer in our stack is the Grocy Android app, which provides a mobile front-end to the Grocy-Home Assistant installation and allows for camera-based barcode scanning.

The program was written in Java by a pair of brothers, Patrik and Dominic Zedler, during the start of the Covid lockdown (see the About section of the ReadMe). The app is currently on its 3rd full point release after five years of development (currently v3.7.0), although only one of the brothers is still maintaining it. The update schedule is still relatively frequent at present and it is, like Grocy, now fully featured. So it should be useable for some time as is, even if development ceases. Also, as mentioned previously, there is a possibility of falling back to an SSL version of Grocy that will read barcodes natively (untested by me but on my list to check out).

Support options are somewhat limited; there is an in-app FAQ, some of which is replicated on the GitHub FAQ page. But other than that it appears that the Grocy Reddit might be the best place to try to ask for help. Any issues/bugs can always be reported on GitHub of course.

As it is only a front-end to the Grocy server there is no data to back up, so in case of a software or hardware issue the recovery option is via re-installation and connecting back to Grocy via the API keys previously established for this purpose.

Looking back over the system as a whole (Home Assistant/Grocy/Grocy app) it appears to be well supported, stable and simple back-up and recovery options are available through the Home Assistant interface.

With that conclusion made it is now time to move forward with an operational trial of the system to assess whether it is useful in the real world (ie my house).

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