How I replaced the Verisure app with Home Assistant

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Reverse-Engineering on Marcello Barnaba

How I replaced the Verisure app with Home Assistant

The problem