I’ll share my settings because it sucks to get it working. It’s a good thing that you would have @RRodman and I to help you get things working. Rob did all the research. The documentation sucks otherwise. We’ll do a community post in the coming days.
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For a year or so I used SMS messages out of node-red but, for whatever reason, they started getting delayed anywhere from a minute to days(!) so I switched to Telegram. node-red-contrib-telegrambot It was a PITA to get setup, probably because I never looked at it before that, but has been rock solid. I created a bot that NR uses to send with but intentionally stopped right there as I don’t want to use Telegram for any other communications. I’ll help you as much as I can but I don’t remember much below the 30,000 foot level so caveat emptor.
I’ll probably go down the Tasker route. I use it to turn on the screen on my tablet in the kitchen, so will probably do something similar for notifications. But it’s good to hear there will be something built in.
I’ve been meaning to get back to testing the setup for actionable notifications someone posted on the HE Community.
I found tasker difficult to sort out. Seems odd considering. The irony is not lost in this. But, in my defense, I haven’t had a solid use case to make me want to sort it out. Maybe someday.
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Yeah, I’m more a fan of what you can do with Tasker and it’s plugins, but not so much the interface. I also find it difficult and frustrating, but once you get something setup, it can do some really neat stuff.
Oh, and I expect I’ll probably shift to the built-in option when it becomes available.
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I posted a bit about this in HE community. At the time I was able to include three buttons in the notification that would trigger different cloud urls. Works a treat.
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I’m looking forward to seeing what that is. 
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I use telegram, for me this has been very reliable
Since I use telegram for my unraid notifications, just made sense
Telegram can do this!
I haven’t delved too much Into it, but I did set up a small test flow and can confirm it works very well
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Ditto. I left the receiver node in place, connected to nothing, but it would be easy to receive commands back and do something with them in NR. I just don’t have anything I care to do that with yet.
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I use it alot in general notifications like baterry rry levels, if sensors activate when away from home, blue iris alarms, general notifications
The actionable notification I set up was for my garage door.
If I/we left the house (mode=away) and garage Roller door was left open, it could notify me saying door was open and asks if I would like to close it. Send a ‘Yes’ message back it it would then close the door.
At the the time this was the only real use case I could think of so like yourself didn’t do much else.
When I get back around too it, I’m sure there is much more I could use it for.
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A lot of problems with apps like that on Android is actually the phone aggressively killing things to save battery, there’s only so much app devs can do to keep services running in the background.
It’s part of the reason why some apps require a persistent notification to stay running.
Some manufacturers (Samsung) are worse than others, even something as simple as a 3rd party alarm clock app can have problems with the way background tasks are killed
https://dontkillmyapp.com/ has a lot of info on how to attempt to keep it from being a problem
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Owntracks is one of those apps and while I do think this is definitely possible, I doubt it is the issue in my case: one, because of the aforementioned notification, and two, even if I open the app it still was broken for me.
I really think it was the settings I used, but I asked over on the HE forums for advice and it didn’t help, so I tried it on my brother’s iPhone and it worked without issue, the exact same settings I was using on my Pixel 5a.
Also Life360 works without issue on my Pixel 5a or his iPhone 12, so they obviously have figured it out regardless of platform.
Life360 was completely unreliable and way off on where i was when it did work. Owntracks on the other hand has been rock solid for over a year without a single missed event, and i can even plot my movements to a map in real time. The android documentation is kinda hidden/buried, and you are correct that it doesn’t work quite the same as IOS. I can provide some guidance on Owntrack under android if anyone does need it
That being said if you have a solution working well for your needs DONT change it 
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Very interesting, I would appreciate a setup guide for Owntracks.
Regarding Life360 what phones/android versions did you test and have issues with? I tried with a Razer Phone 2 on A9 and a Pixel 5a on A12 without issue on either.
Honestly i could only guess at this point as its been more than a year that i’ve been running with own, I’ve also upgraded then broken and replaced my phone since then, so yeah…
I’ll see if I can find time to throw one together for you at some point in the next few days.
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I’m wondering whether, down the track, there could be a central and consistent way to initiate a notification from within Core, still with the option to select the delivery method, like people have listed through this thread?
Two - three lines was much shorter than what I originally typed up I guess I’m thinking a full end-to-end notification setup is probably a bridge too far so early in Core’s existence, so masking the underlying platform used would at least provide a consistent UX, whether you want to use Telegram, Pushover, (willing to forgo Tasker).
This sounds a bit presumptuous… Hopefully it doesn’t come across in the wrong way… April has already indicated that there are ideas in train… it does sound like I think these ideas haven’t been considered… I’m sure there has plenty of thought put towards this, but hopefully I can introduce something new in this space… or at least re-enforce some existing ideas…
I’ve been playing around in Node-RED with Locative and the node webhookrelay. Despite the fact that I most likely have configured this slightly incorrect, it seem to be working as intended when we’re leaving or entering within the geofence.
The only caveat is that the free plan only gives you 150 webhooks per month, might be on a lower side even for us with a household of two. Sure, you can op-in for the basic monthly plan with 1500 webhooks at $4.99pm, but I usually dislike these kind of running fee’s and it’s also a bit of over-kill.
So to the question, will webhooks be available down the road with CORE? Maybe a stupid question… could it be possible to run your private secure instance within perhaps Docker and a NAS… RPi??
The thing that sold me on OwnTracks was that it reports directly to my own system, no cloud involved. Anything cloud, with very few exceptions like Google Drive, is a deal-breaker for me. As if Google knowing my location were any comfort 
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Naturally I agree in the fact that even I prefer not to be dependent nor giving any information to a third-party. But I’ve had such a high success rate out of Locative, therefore it was my go-to. OwnTracks is using MQTT, isn’t it?
We were relying on Google before I got the Synology, now documents, contacts, photos and calendars for both me and my wife are all hosted locally. So I know the feeling! 
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That’s what I use but it can also do http, which I have not tried.
It also has the option to encrypt it’s messages, which I do use. You’ll need to use the OwnTracks node in NR to decrypt them.
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