Got you. So the Hello Home will link to your app. So i made a new mode Home Night and under your Honey Im Home app, I have mine and my wifes phone configured after sunset and my hello home action which is I’m Back Night will automatically update my mode to home Night… sounds about right?
Close, but not quite!
We are working with Hello Home actions here, not modes, The 2 are really completely separate although Hello Home actions can change modes.
Leaving Modes aside, a Hello action just performs a predetermined set of actions. So, Your New Hello Home action “I am Back Night” would be configured to turn a bunch of lights on. It could change your mode as well but that is not necessary for this to work properly. Think of a mode as a flag that other things can use to decide what to do. If you have other things dependent upon the mode, then by all means use this to change the mode but it is not a requirement.
Everyone is different, but I have mine set up like this:
4 modes:
Day, Evening, Night, Away
I have those modes because I want different things to happen when they are in force.
I have corresponding hello home actions that change the modes based on inputs and in some cases also change the state of devices:
“Sunrise” fires at sunrise, changes the mode to Day
"Everyone" Left changes the mode to Away when no one is left in the house, and turns most of the lights off if they are on
"Sunset" fires at Sunset and turns on the lights and sets the mode to Evening but not if the previous mode is Away (so the lights don’t come on at sunset if noone is home)
“Goodnight” is activated manually at bedtime and turns off the lights and sets the mode to Night
I use my program above to fire Sunrise if I come home in the light and Sunset if I come home in the dark - this means that I am able to re-use those hello home actions without having to re-enter all the lights, thermostat settings etc etc, because I want the state of the house to be the same whether Sunset just happened, or I just got home after Dinner at 9pm - no need to duplicate that setup. Same argument for daytime, although you might not need to do anything special in your case.
None of the above requires the modes so far but I use them for other things. For example, I will get notifications for motion on my porch but ONLY if the mode is Away. If I had internal motion sensors I could have them sound a siren if there was motion inside the house but the mode was away. Those same motion sensors could turn the lights on dimly if the mode was set to Night.
So modes are really a way of influencing the behavior of the system under certain triggers, they are not part of the actions themselves. Many Smartapps by default have the ability to restrict the modes under which they will operate, some will work for any mode. For instance I want my porch light to come on at sunset regardless of whether I am in Day Mode or Away Mode, but I only want that porch motion warning if I am not present.
Hello home actions perform actions of all sorts but are not necessarily tied to modes, I have several Hello Home actions that don’t change the mode, for instance one that turns on my outside lights. That happens on a timer after my Sunset event fires so I don’t want it to change the mode, it simply turns the lights on.
Hope this helps!
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Thanks for the explanation Andrew. Yes makes sense… and the reason why I kept on stating on updating my modes using the Hello Home action is that I need my Mode to go from Away to Home because on my away mode, I have triggers such as motion and open close sensors to trigger for security purposes… Also, after all this I may not be needing your app after all… I just realized that I can set my lights to go on a certain time using my phone presence as the trigger under the light and switches setting. So I no longer need to incorporate it to the Hello Home Action. thanks for your help!
No problem - glad you found a way to do what you wanted 
I am curious, how do you have things triggered by Mode? I am trying to figure all of this out and it isn’t exactly intuitive in the Android SmartThings app.
I just now figured out how to have things trigger the Hello Home actions, which do a lot of actions as well as set the Modes. So I know how to do what I want. But triggering when the Mode changes confuses me.
Sim,
What exactly is it you are trying to set up? Perhaps if you specify we’ll be able to help