Home Assistant's development branch now accepts sign-ins through a Tailscale address, a global IPv6 address or another public IP. The fix by Joakim Plate (elupus), reviewed by balloob, was merged on 17 October 2026. It went into the dev branch, so it should arrive with Home Assistant 2026.11 rather than in a 2026.10 patch release.
Home Assistant changed the way it groups integrations on 16 and 17 October 2026. A series of pull requests by Franck Nijhof added 28 categories with 64 subcategories to core and a categories key to the integration manifest, then filled that key in for every integration. On the evening of 17 October a new integrations page went live on home-assistan
HACS, the community store most people use to install custom integrations and dashboard cards, stops being a separate download. From Home Assistant 2026.11, due in November, it ships with Home Assistant as a built-in integration called the Marketplace, found under Settings > Marketplace. Franck Nijhof's core pull request was merged on 1 October 2026
A community developer has published Zendure RestAPI, a custom Home Assistant integration that controls Zendure SolarFlow home batteries entirely over the local network. It talks to the battery's own HTTP server through Zendure's zenSDK API, with no Zendure cloud account and no MQTT broker. The author announced it on the Home Assistant forum on 16 O
A Home Assistant backup is only useful if three things survive the day your server dies: the backup file, the key that decrypts it, and the username and password you had when it was made. When a restore fails, one of those three is usually missing, and very often it is the file itself, because the only copy sat on the SD card or SSD that just gave
Home Assistant is getting a new integration called Debug console: a Python prompt inside the running Home Assistant, much like the console in a web browser's developer tools. Franck Nijhof's backend (#186547) and the frontend tab (#54937) were both merged on 16 October 2026, and the documentation lists the integration for Home Assistant 2026.11.
On Home Assistant OS, every Home Assistant update still waits for someone to open the update panel and press Install. That is about to change for patch releases. On 16 October 2026 the first two pieces of "Automatic Home Assistant updates for patch releases" were merged into the development branch, and the plan for the rest is public in the project
Home Assistant Core 2026.10.2 came out on the evening of 16 October 2026 (22:04 Warsaw time), with 50 changes listed in the release notes. Most are fixes for single integrations, but a few affect everyone who uses MQTT, state conditions or more than one user account.
On 16 October 2026 Home Assistant gained three new Core triggers so automations no longer need template sensors to notice a version change or a pending restart. The work lands in the 2026.11 development tree. Franck Nijhof merged homeassistant.updated in the afternoon and, a few hours later, homeassistant.restart_required and homeassistant.host_reb
