Feature Request: Support Zeroconf/Bonjour/mDNS

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Cannot create HTTP shortcuts to Zeroconf/Bonjour/mDNS .local domains.

Describe the solution you’d like HTTP requests to http://my-iot-device.local should work in addition to http://x.x.x.x IP addresses.

Describe alternatives you’ve considered I currently use the device IP address, but it is tedious and error prone.

Additional context

An Android OS issue, which should be handled at the OS level as it is in Linux, Windows, MacOS, and iOS. The workaround is handling it in-app.

• Example implementation https://www.dodgycoder.net/2015/02/setting-up-bonjourzeroconfmdnsnsd.html
• Android docs for using NSD https://developer.android.com/training/connect-devices-wirelessly/nsd.html#discover
• Android OS feature requests:
  • Zeroconf/Bonjour support, so I can do things like http://mycomputer.local
  • Add .local mDNS resolving to Android

[Waboodoo]

That is unfortunate. I spent a few more hours tinkering with this and found that mDNS on Android is simply cursed. For me the Local Finder app that you mentioned doesn’t seem to work on either of the 2 devices that I tried it, so there seem to be some hardware or vendor software issues involved as well.

When researching this topic I found that everyone only talks about service resolution, hardly ever about host resolution, i.e., all the interfaces and libraries for mDNS on Android only deal with discovering services, but resolving a “.local” hostname to an IP address seems to be a much trickier problem.

The way the HTTP Shortcuts app works for now is that it scans for any service of type “_http._tcp” where the name of the service matches the host name. This is not the proper way to do it of course, so naturally it doesn’t work properly in most of the cases. It seems to work for your NAS, so I assume that the NAS advertises such a service using the same name, while your other 2 devices do not. So maybe as a workaround you could try to configure your Pi to advertise a “_http._tcp” service in the local network. Not great, but I’m out of ideas for now on how to make this work out of the box, so I’ll leave this as it is now and hopefully find some pointers eventually.

[Waboodoo]

Thanks for the useful links. This seems doable to implement, and it is not the first time it has been requested, so I think I will look into this when I have time.