What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.11.18
This release lets a Compass layout hold several Home Assistant dashboard views and adds an optional fade in and out for the screensaver. It also fixes a screensaver that could stay on screen after it was dismissed, an out of memory crash while Home Assistant shows a live view of the Device camera and two causes of app restarts.
New Feature: Several dashboard views in the Compass layout
A Compass layout can now hold more than one Home Assistant dashboard view. Add as many as the layout has room for, each view once. Every other kind of view still goes in once. See Several dashboard views.
- One page for every dashboard view. All dashboard views show in the same page, so more views do not load Home Assistant again. A swipe from one dashboard view to another keeps its picture of the new view up until the page has built it, for up to 2.5 seconds.
- The layout follows the page. If the page moves to a dashboard view of the layout on its own, such as through a navigation card, the layout moves to that view's place.
- Return to home dashboard view. While Compass is on, Return to home dashboard view goes back to the view picked for the place on screen, not to the default dashboard. The line under that setting says so.
New Feature: Fade in and out for the screensaver
A new Fade in and out switch in Settings > Screensaver, off by default, fades the screensaver in over the dashboard and fades it out when it is dismissed, instead of switching at once.
- No black frame on the way out. The fade out waits until the dashboard is drawing again, so a dashboard paused under the screensaver never shows as a black frame.
- Dimming waits for the fade. A screensaver that dims the screen does so once the fade in is over.
- Which screensavers fade. Plugin screensavers fade on Android 8 and later. The Home Assistant Media, Website and Camera Streams screensavers still switch without a fade.
- Android animations off. The fade runs even when Android animations are off, unless Follow Android animation settings is on.
Improvements
- Compass keeps a snapshot of every view in the layout. The swipe kept snapshots of 6 views, so in a larger layout the views visited longest ago went back to a card with their name. It now keeps one for each of the 9 views a full layout holds.
Fixes
- A screensaver that stayed on screen after it was dismissed. If a touch or a command dismissed the screensaver in the instant it was starting, while it was still reading the screen brightness, the screensaver came up anyway and nothing could dismiss it until the app restarted. It now stays dismissed. This affected screensavers with their own brightness, Dim and Black.
- Out of memory crash while Home Assistant shows a live view of the Device camera. A frame request from Home Assistant names no camera, so each one also took a screenshot for the Screenshot camera. With the device camera off, the "Camera off" picture answered at once and a live view asked again about 180 times a second. Screenshots piled up faster than they finished and each one held a full picture of the screen in memory: on a Galaxy Tab S8 the app passed 2 GB in 3 seconds. On 32-bit devices, such as the Echo Shows and older Samsung and Lenovo tablets, the app crashed. Screenshots are now taken one at a time and shared by every request waiting for one, in Home Assistant and in the remote admin. The "Camera off" picture is sent once a second at most.
- App restart when the network address lookup stalls. The announcement that lets Home Assistant discover the device looked up the device's address on the main thread every 30 seconds. On some devices, the Echo Show 8 among them, that lookup can stall for a minute, and the app restarted. The lookup now runs in the background.
- App restart when Android stalls on a battery read. The charging state and the battery level were read on the main thread. When Android took a minute to answer, the app restarted. Both are now read in the background.