If your dashboards or automations use UniFi Protect diagnostics such as NVR CPU load, camera uptime or SSH switches, plan a cleanup. On 21 October 2026 a change by Raphael Hehl was merged into the development branch for Home Assistant 2026.11 that deprecates a whole group of UniFi Protect entities. They are scheduled to disappear in Home Assistant
Home Assistant is building its own desktop app for installing Home Assistant OS, and on 21 October 2026 it published the first two test builds. The Home Assistant Installer (HAI in the repository) is a cross-platform application that flashes SD cards for the Raspberry Pi, ODROID and other boards, installs on generic x86-64 and ARM64 mini PCs, flash
The matter.js-based Matter Server, which Home Assistant's Matter integration talks to, got two quick follow-up releases on 21 October 2026, one day after version 1.5.0. Version 1.5.1 fixes a regression that broke the move from the old Python Matter Server: after the migration all devices showed as unavailable with empty attributes. Version 1.5.2 fo
Three fixes merged into Home Assistant Core on 21 October 2026 deal with the hour that happens twice when daylight saving time ends. They touch the schedule helper, time_pattern triggers and long-term statistics. All three came from Raman Gupta, were reviewed by Paulus Schoutsen, and were found with property-based testing.
Many Home Assistant blueprints ask for settings that only matter in one mode. Four pull requests by Paul Bottein, merged on 21 and 22 October 2026, add a visible condition that shows an input, or a whole section of inputs, only when another field has a given value. It works in blueprints and in the setup and options forms of integrations. The chang
Building a dashboard card for one device usually means picking its entities by hand, and the card goes stale as soon as an integration update adds a new sensor or drops an old one. A new device section strategy, written by Paul Bottein and merged into the Home Assistant frontend on 21 October 2026, fills a section with a single device's entities an
The Group integration in Home Assistant gets a new member type: calendars. Joakim Plate's change, merged on 21 October 2026, lets you combine several calendar entities, for example work, school and family, into a single calendar entity. It is in the development branch, so it should ship with Home Assistant 2026.11.
If an old iPad or a cheap Fire tablet hangs on the wall as a Home Assistant panel, check its browser before the November update. On 21 October 2026 the Home Assistant frontend raised its minimum browser versions to Chrome 67, Safari and iOS 15.4, and Firefox 98. Until now the floor was Chrome 59, iOS 12 and Firefox 94. The change is merged into the
The first release candidate of Home Assistant OS 18.4 came out on 20 October 2026 and is already offered on the beta channel. The developers call it a small bugfix and security release, mostly cleaning up kernel regressions introduced in 18.3. Two changes stand out: release images now come with a signature you can check, and the VLAN problem on Rea
