Skip to main content

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).

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Grocy and its Home Assistant Add-on

The next layer of the Virtual Bean Counter software stack is the meat in the sandwich, Grocy (see Grocy system install ). As with the Home Assistant (HA) Operating System that was reviewed previously the aim of this article is to consider the support and backup options for the Grocy system as installed onto our HA virtual machine . But first a little history. Whither Grocy ? It sprang from the desire of a software developer, Bernd Bestel , to progress beyond using Excel (as we know a great spreadsheet and data analysis tool but with a limited UI) to something more fully featured by exploiting his experience with commercial inventory management. The first version of Grocy was released in 2017 and after seven years is now on its fourth full point release . However, unlike HA, it is essentially a one-man band with a single developer responsible for pretty much the entirety of the content all without stable funding (currently). That said the package is quite mature and " does wha...
Post a Comment
Read more

Further adventures in household paper products

As the toilet rolls are up and running I couldn't resist adding the rest of the loft stocks into the mix. The next two items are kitchen roll and facial tissues . Following the same process described for toilet rolls; kitchen roll comes in a multipack, but this time a case has four packs of three rolls and we already have the storage location, shop and quantity units set up. Again, I think we'll have to set up a generic item (Parent product) as well as a specific one for the Kirkland brand rolls (Child product). So I gave it a name, Kitchen roll and a description; default storage location and shop, Loft / Costco ; a min stock amount, 3 rolls ; all the quantity units are Roll . Job done. Now for the specific product, as previously, pulling images and descriptions off the Costco website, setting up case and pack barcodes and quantity conversions between them, buying in Cases and using in Packs . But hang on, do we really want to track in packs of three? We only need a sin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Man Down! - HA-Grocy goes off the rails

Problems, problems. As part of an HA-Grocy update to v0.24.0, released on the 16 th Feb 2025, a point version upgrade of Grocy was included from v4.3.0 to v4.4.1. Unfortunately it was found that the update had dismasted parts of the HA-Grocy app (see 1 / 2 ), preventing users from opening pop-up windows in the Grocy iframe ; for instance, when clicking the " Add " button in tasks no action is taken. The root cause was a bug in the Grocy version released on the 31 st January (v4.4.1). Although to be fair, Grocy is not specifically aimed at supporting Home Assistant (HA) and as a standalone installation the Grocy program continued to function normally. Happily, the bug was patched by Bernd in v4.4.2, released on 28 th Feb. Unhappily, the HA-Grocy Add-on is still missing the patch as of the 20 th June. So if you are installing from the Add-on Store in Home Assistant it simply won't be fully functional (this is tested and confirmed). If you've already install...
Post a Comment
Read more