Home Assistant’s Franck Nijhof has announced the release of Home Assistant 2026.2, which brings with it a shift to the new Home Dashboard default display, a rebranding of add-on packages, redesigned quick search, and the ability to opt-in to data gathering for a planned public device database.
“The new Home Dashboard is now the official default for all new installations,” Nijhof says in the new release announcement. “If you’ve been using Home Assistant for a while and never customized your default view, you’ll get a suggestion to switch; give it a try! Add-ons are now called Apps! After a lot of community discussion, it was time to use terminology that everyone understands. Your TV has apps, your phone has apps, and now Home Assistant has apps too. My personal favorite this release? The completely redesigned Quick search! If you’re like me and navigate Home Assistant using your keyboard, you’re going to love this one. Press ⌘ + K (or Ctrl + K on Windows/Linux) and you have instant access to everything.”
Another key change in the new release is support for opt-in data gathering to populate the Open Home Foundation Device Database, announced earlier this week. This, Home Assistant’s Matthias Kerstner explained at the time, aims to gather real-world usage and reliability information for a broad range of smart home devices and make anonymized data available to all — finally answering the question of not only “does this product work with Home Assistant” but “does this product work at all outside a controlled lab environment?”
Other changes in the new release include more purpose-specific triggers and conditions, though these are still disabled by default as a work-in-progress Home Assistant Labs feature, a new card for the dashboard that displays a stacked horizontal bar chart of how a home’s power is being distributed across tracked devices, and new integrations for backing data up to Cloudflare’s R2 storage, electricity pricing data from Green Planet Energy, control and monitoring of HDFury video processing devices, monitoring for NRGkick GEn2 mobile electric vehicle (EV) chargers, support for the Prana heat recovery ventilation system family, and the uHoo air quality monitor range.
The new release does, however, bring with it some breaking changes users should note before attempting to upgrade: sensor group behavior has shifted so that the group itself becomes unavailable if all members are also available; those with self-hosted Sentry installations will need to upgrade to version 20.6.0 or higher before upgrading Home Assistant; Tractive activity, calories burned, and sleep sensors have been removed; Tuya HVAC automations may need to be updated; and VeSync’s advanced_sleep preset mode has been replaced by sleep.
More information is available in the full changelog, while the new release is now available to download on the Home Assistant website and on GitHub where the source code is made available under the permissive Apache 2.0 license.