What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.10.21
This release brings photo details to the Home Assistant Media and Local Media screensavers and lets you pick which wakes bring the screensaver back. Other apps' music now ducks during voice interactions, and Home Assistant can set the screensaver's screen off time. It also fixes a header gap on Lenovo's Android 15 tablets and a six second delay before the wake word answered on custom pages.
Improvements
- Photo details on the Home Assistant Media and Local Media screensavers. The metadata panel of the Immich Media screensaver now comes to Home Assistant Media and Local Media too, read from each photo's EXIF. Turn on Show metadata on either screensaver's page to show when the photo was taken and the camera with its focal length, aperture and ISO in a corner. The panel has the same Metadata position, Text drop shadow, Text scaling and Vignette strength settings as Immich Media. Location stays an Immich Media feature, since turning GPS coordinates into a place name needs a lookup service.
- Wake to screensaver picks what wakes to the screensaver. Wake to screensaver was a switch that covered motion, face, proximity and person detection, while the power button and touch always opened the dashboard. It is now a box that opens a list to pick from: Motion, Face, Proximity, Person, Power button and Touch. A picked wake after the screen has turned off brings the screensaver back with a fresh Turn screen off after countdown, and anything not picked opens the dashboard. Android does not tell apps what woke the screen, so Power button covers every wake Kiosk Satellite did not start itself, including double-tap to wake and the mute button on an Echo Show running LineageOS, which acts as its power button. Touch works with Use a black screen instead: the first touch brings the screensaver back and a second touch opens the dashboard. A kiosk that had the switch on picks everything except Touch, so nothing changes on update.
- Other apps' music ducks during voice interactions. Kiosk Satellite now requests Android audio focus for voice turns, announcements, timers, alarms and intercom calls, then releases it when they end. Music apps like Poweramp and Spotify lower their volume the way they do for any assistant and come back afterwards. How far they drop is up to Android or the app, so the Sendspin duck volume setting still applies only to Sendspin. Podcast and audiobook apps usually pause instead and resume on release.
- Screensaver screen off after in ESPHome. A new Screensaver screen off after number sets Turn screen off after from Home Assistant, from 0 to 60 minutes. An automation can keep a bedroom kiosk lit by day and let it go dark at night. A change while the screensaver runs restarts the countdown at the new value. An active scheduled screensaver with its own screen off time still takes precedence.
- Camera views can auto-dismiss after up to an hour. Auto-dismiss after in Camera Streams, Playback went up to 5 minutes, too short for a view left up on purpose, like a baby monitor. It now reaches 1 hour. The slider keeps 30 second steps up to 5 minutes, then moves in 5 minute steps, so a saved time stays as it was.
- Wider view tiles in the dashboard picker. The picker shows two views per row instead of three, on the device and in the remote admin, so a view's path is no longer cut off after a few letters.
- Softer text in the light theme. Text in the light theme is now dark gray (#444444) instead of near black, on the device and in the remote admin.
Fixes
- The dashboard reaches the top of the screen on Lenovo's Android 15 tablets. On a Lenovo Tab One and similar ZUI tablets, Home Assistant's header sat one status bar lower than it should, whatever the Display cutout setting. These tablets put a multi-window handle at the top of every full screen app and report its space to the page, which Home Assistant pads its header by. The kiosk now keeps that space from the page, as it already did for the hidden status and navigation bars.
- The wake word answers at once on a custom page. With a custom page as the dashboard, every wake word waited about six seconds before listening started, with native Voice Satellite too. Before each turn the kiosk makes sure the dashboard's Home Assistant connection is live, and a custom page has no Home Assistant frontend to check, so it waited out the full timeout. A page without one now skips the check.