Sorry about your cat. We typically have a Rover stop in to check on our cats when we’re gone for a bit; it’s nice to get them some human interaction and they always send pictures and give updates.

I personally have a camera setup inside that just streams to HomeAssistant so we can check on them ourselves when we’re out just for the weekend. I disconnect it when Rovers are stopping by though because I don’t want them to feel spied on. No need for anything fancy really, but if you really want NVR I just use Frigate (for other things, the cat camera really is just a stream). It’s free and open source and really easy to set up.

WireGuard is a very easy way to set up the access. My router has just the single WireGuard UDP port forwarded

There are definitely good, non malicious reasons to have it as a separate app and that should actually be preferred. Off the top of my head:

• Separation of permissions - it only has the permissions it asks for instead of every permission messages has
• It can be disabled/removed without disabling messages
• it can be reused by other applications if that’s a desirable feature

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