There are several ways to "skin that cat" and avoid having to force your wife into turning on/off Tailscale.Yeap, just finished loading Tailscale and a shortcut to UI3 on her android phone.
hopefully it should be pretty easy for her to use. Will go over on how to turn Tailscale Off & On and log into UI3.
She's plays around with the Amcrest Smart Home for our AD110 Doorbell, hopefully she doesn't mess up any settings in Blue Iris
1) Use Wireguard instead of Tailscale. The Android Wiregard app can be set up to only send data over the VPN for specific apps. I use the BI app, but it would also work if you use a second browser that is only used for "BI access". This way you can set up this BI only browser to connect using the Wireguard tunnel, but only this app and nothing else. This way she can leave the VPN on full time and only when she uses the BI shortcut/browser does it connect/send data to the home network.
2) Use the app Tasker to create an automation sequence that will turn on/off the Tailscale connection. I previously did this with OpnVPN and it worked great. I have to assume it can be set up the same way with Tailscale, but I haven't tried it personally. You can create a shortcut on her phone's " launcher (with the BI icon even) that would start this Taster "task" which starts the Tailscale connection and opens the browser (or BI app) to the correct page. Closing the app/browser can start a new task that automatically turns off the Tailscale connection too. Again, this probably works best if you use a different browser app for the singular purpose of accessing BI so that you can add the on/off functionality of the Tailscale connection without needing more complexity.
I initially did #2 and it worked fine for years. However I am hosting more and more apps on my local network (BI, Home Assistant, Immich, etc, etc, etc) and it eventually became easier to move to solution #1. Outside of the initial Wireguard setup (which isn't hard at all), method #1 is dead simple to use. I've set both my wife's phone and my phone to use Wireguard for any/all of those apps that need to connect directly with the local network. My wife has no idea what is happening behind the scenes because it simply works like any other app.
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