April 4, 2026 · 6 min read

How I replaced the Verisure app with Home Assistant

The Verisure app is garbage. There, I said it.

It’s not that the alarm itself is bad — the SDVECU panel is solid, the sensors are reliable, the installation is professional. But the app. Good lord, the app.

The problem¶

You open the app to check your alarm status and you’re greeted by an ad for Verisure itself. I pay through the nose for the service and they shove ads inside the app. It’s 2026 and a security company is showing me banner ads when I’m trying to verify that my house is protected.

But the ads are the least of it. The real problems are:

Blind routines. Yes, the app has “routines” — arm at midnight, disarm at 7. But they have no idea where you are. It’s midnight and you’re still in the garden? The alarm arms and the sensors go off. Window open? The panel announces it can’t arm, but if you don’t hear it the alarm stays disarmed. Go on vacation and forget to disable the morning disarm routine? Alarm off with an empty house. And routine changes take 20 minutes to propagate — “or the next day”. In 2026.
Zero presence awareness. The app doesn’t know where you are. It doesn’t know who’s home. It doesn’t know if the cleaning lady has left. No location-based automation whatsoever.
One camera at a time. Want to see all your cameras? Tap, wait, go back, tap the next one, wait. No overview. No “capture all”.
Biblically slow. Request an image, wait, wait, maybe it arrives. Sometimes you reload the app and try again. In 2026.
No permanent storage. Captured images vanish. There’s no browsable history.
No timestamps on images. You capture a photo and you don’t know when it was taken or which camera took it. You have to remember. For a security system, that’s embarrassing.
Generic notifications. One notification, same for everyone. No actionable notifications, no critical alerts that bypass Do Not Disturb.

What I wanted: my alarm, integrated into my smart home, with intelligent automations, notifications for all residents, and a dashboard that shows everything at a glance. No ads.

The solution: Home Assistant + a custom integration¶

I wrote ha-verisure-italy, a custom component for Home Assistant that talks directly to the Verisure Italy GraphQL APIs (customers.verisure.it). It completely replaces the app for alarm control and camera monitoring.

What it does¶

Alarm control — arm partial+perimeter (“at home”), full+perimeter (“away”), disarm
Force arm — when the alarm won’t arm because a window is open, one tap to force it. Or better: an automation that forces automatically when you leave
Cameras — auto-discovered, parallel capture with timestamp overlay, buttons for single camera and “capture all”
Auto-generated dashboard — alarm panel, camera grid, capture buttons, everything auto-populated in the HA sidebar

The automations the app can’t do¶

Here’s what runs in production at my house:

Arm when the last person leaves. A binary sensor tracks who’s home (GPS + WiFi via OpenWrt presence detection). When everyone’s out, the alarm arms automatically.

Safety net. Every 5 minutes, if nobody’s home and the alarm is off, it re-arms and sends a notification. Because life is complicated and presence sensors get it wrong sometimes.

Automatic force-arm. If the alarm won’t arm because a window is open, the integration detects the block, notifies which zones are open, and forces the arm. An armed alarm with exceptions is better than a disarmed alarm. Verisure routines? The panel announces the failure — but if you’re not there to hear it, the alarm stays off.

Smart night arming. Not “arm at midnight” like Verisure routines. It arms between midnight and 7 AM only when it detects that both residents are home and at rest. You’re in the garden at 2 AM? The alarm waits.

Safe morning disarm. Disarms at 7, but only if someone is home. Go to the beach and forget? The alarm stays armed. With Verisure routines you have to remember to disable them — and if you forget, you wait 20 minutes (or a day) for propagation.

Actionable notification on arrival. You arrive home with the alarm armed? A notification with a “Disarm” button right on your phone. Auto-dismisses if the alarm gets disarmed by other means.

Critical status notification. If the alarm reports an unknown state, a critical notification that bypasses iOS Do Not Disturb. This is security software — no error can go unnoticed.

And all of this works via CarPlay — I see the alarm status and receive notifications right from the car.

Technical design¶

This isn’t a weekend project. It’s security software: one wrong behavior = alarm disarmed = the burglar gets in. Every decision optimizes for correctness, not convenience.

Two-layer architecture¶

API Client (verisure-italy on PyPI) — typed GraphQL client, Pydantic models for every request/response, no dict, no Any. If the response doesn’t match: ValidationError. Crash loud at the boundary, guaranteed types on the inside.
HA Integration (custom_components/verisure_italy/) — alarm control panel, camera, buttons, config flow with 2FA, auto-generated dashboard. Our code, clean, Italy-specific.

State machine¶

The Verisure panel has 6 protocol states across two axes: interior (OFF/PARTIAL/FULL) x perimeter (OFF/ON). The state machine enumerates all of them. An unknown state is an error, never a default. The code crashes loud and notifies a human.

Engineering principles¶

Fail-secure. Unknown state = ERROR, never “probably disarmed”. Timeout = keep previous state and notify.
Parse at the boundary. JSON from the API → Pydantic models at the HTTP level. If parsing fails, it blows up there. Inside the codebase, types guarantee correctness.
No silent defaults. No .get() with fallbacks on data that must exist. No = None hiding degradations.
Strict type system. Pyright in strict mode, 0 errors, 14 seconds. 165 tests. Ruff for linting. scripts/check.sh runs everything in one shot.

Iterations, not big bang¶

The project started as a POC: “can I talk to the Verisure APIs from Python?” Yes. Then: “can I integrate it into HA?” Yes. From there, iteration after iteration:

Working POC
Basic HA integration (arm/disarm/status)
Cameras with parallel capture
Config flow with 2FA
Auto-generated dashboard
Force-arm with exception handling
v0.7.0 — hardening from code review: 3 CRITICAL and 7 HIGH resolved
v0.8.0 — second review: all HIGH and MEDIUM resolved, pyright clean, 165 tests, clean boundaries, thread safety

At every iteration, code review with 8 parallel agents (4 line-level + 4 architecture) combing through every file. Nothing gets left behind.

Installation¶

The integration installs via HACS (Home Assistant Community Store) — the community’s custom component manager. If you haven’t installed it yet, follow the official guide.

Once HACS is active:

Or manually via HACS → Custom repositories → https://github.com/vjt/ha-verisure-italy → Integration.

The API client installs automatically from PyPI. The config flow guides setup with full 2FA support. The dashboard generates itself.

Why isn’t it in the official HA catalog? The integration is young — I’m putting it through its paces with early adopters before submitting it for official inclusion. HACS is the right channel for this stage.

What’s missing¶

Permanent image storage. The building blocks are there (captured images are bytes in memory), the persistence layer is missing.
Event timeline. The API exposes events, but we don’t consume them yet.
Multi-installation support. The code handles one installation. The guard against duplicates is there, but multi-install is yet to be implemented.

Conclusion¶

The Verisure app is a black box with ads slapped on top. Home Assistant is an open platform where every piece is programmable. It’s no contest.

The code is on GitHub, the API client on PyPI, example automations in the documentation.

Happy hacking!