The free and open-source smart home platform, Home Assistant, just released another major update. Home Assistant 2026.1 has some helpful improvements to the dashboards, new service integrations, and a pile of bug fixes to enjoy.
This is the first release for Home Assistant in 2026, and since most of the development period was in December’s holiday season while “contributors and maintainers have been enjoying some well-deserved time off,” there aren’t many changes. Still, there are a few updates this time around that you’ll probably appreciate.
First, the Home dashboard on mobile devices now has summary cards directly at the top of the page, including information about your lights, security, media players, weather, and energy usage. Your favorites and areas are listed below that. This change replaces the old tab-based navigation, so there’s fewer clicks (or taps) required to find something. Desktop platforms still have the old Home page design.
There’s also a new Devices page in the dashboard, which lists all your devices and connections that aren’t currently assigned to a specific area. No more digging through settings to find missing stuff—everything shows up on that page. Home Assistant’s settings page has also been reorganized, with the protocols section appearing after the core settings.
You might have seen purpose-specific triggers and conditions added in the previous Home Assistant update, allowing you to use triggers like “when a light turns on” or “occupancy detected in the bedroom” in automations. This release adds more trigger types, including when a button is pressed, when a device enters or leaves the home, when a humidifier turns on or off, light brightness, lock status changes, and others. Purpose-specific triggers and conditions are still experimental Labs features, so you have to enable them from Settings > System > Labs to try them out.
The blog post also said, “As the new purpose-specific triggers and conditions all support targeting something bigger than a simple entity (an area, a floor, or even a label), we also redesigned how the target gets displayed on the automation flow. The goal of this change is to allow you to quickly glance and your automation, and understand its purpose.”
Finally, there are some new integrations in Home Assistant 2026.1. You can now control and check Airpatrol air conditioning units, eGauge energy monitors, Fluss+ devices, Fressnapf pet trackers, HomeLink devices, and Watts Vision+ heating systems. There’s also now Fish Audio for generating natural-sounding speech, and a separate WebRTC integration. Other existing integrations have been improved, including Matter, Roborock, and HomeWizard.
If you want to give Home Assistant a try, you can head over to the project’s official website for setup instructions and hardware recommendations.
Source: Home Assistant blog
