jxlarrea/kiosk-satellite 2026.11.20

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What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.11.20

This release completely overhauls Timers. They open in a full screen view, can be set and changed by hand and have their own settings page. With the new Shared timers, a timer can show and ring on several kiosks at once. The release also adds a Genres list to the Music Library and a custom user agent for web pages, and fixes two causes of a kiosk with nothing on screen.

New Feature: Shared timers

A timer started on one kiosk can show and ring on other kiosks at the same time. Turn on Share timers under Settings > Timers and pick the kiosks in Share with. See Shared timers.

• One timer on every kiosk picked. The timer shows and rings on each kiosk with the name of the kiosk it comes from. The countdown and the alert stay in step.
• Control it from any kiosk. Pause, Cancel and Dismiss work on every kiosk that shows the timer.
• Each kiosk has its own list. A kiosk shares with the kiosks picked on it. The timer stays in Home Assistant on the kiosk that started it.
• Refuse timers from other kiosks. Turn off Show shared timers, on by default.
• Requirements. Remote admin and Find other kiosks must be on.

New Feature: Full screen timers view

Timers now open a full screen view when one starts or finishes. See Timers.

• The next timer on top. The timer that ends first shows large with its time as hours, minutes and seconds, a bar that runs down and Pause and Cancel buttons. The other timers are listed beside or under it and the list scrolls with more than three.
• Finished timers. A finished timer shows Time's up with a Dismiss button.
• Ways to open it. The view is a Timers entry in the drawer menu, a view for the Compass layout, an Open the timers gesture action and a ks://timers dashboard link. Kiosk Mode > Allowed Actions has a Timers switch for it.
• Show Timers view when a timer starts. A new switch, on by default. A timer that starts also dismisses the screensaver so the view shows. Turn it off to keep the screen as it is when a timer starts.
• Show Timers view when near completion. A new slider from 30 seconds to 5 minutes, 1 minute by default. The view opens again once a running timer has that long left. The screensaver is dismissed and held back while that timer runs out and while a finished timer waits for Dismiss.
• Pause screensaver while a timer runs. A new switch, off by default. Turn it on to keep the screensaver from starting while the Timers view is open with a running timer on it. A paused timer does not count.

New Feature: Set, change and cancel timers by hand

With native Voice Satellite enabled, timers no longer need a voice command. See Setting and changing timers by hand.

• Set a timer. The timers view has a Set a timer button that opens wheels for hours, minutes and seconds and an optional name.
• Change or delete a timer. Tap a timer's time to change the time it has left or delete it.
• Remote admin. The Timers page lists the kiosk's timers with Set a timer, edit and delete.
• Held by Home Assistant. Timers set this way are held by Home Assistant like the ones set by voice. A timer another kiosk shares is changed on the kiosk that owns it. The name of a running timer cannot be changed.

New Feature: Genres in the Music Library

The Music Assistant library has a Genres list under Tracks, in the sidebar on a tablet and in the chips on a small screen or a phone. See Music Library.

• Every genre with music. The list shows every genre that has music in the library, not only the eight under Browse by genre on Discover. It sorts like the other lists.
• Open or play a genre. Tap a genre to open its artists, albums and tracks, or hold it to play it or add it to the queue.
• Shown when there is something to list. The list shows only when the library has genres with music in them.

New Feature: Custom user agent (#1425)

A new Custom user agent field in Settings > Web Browsing, after Ignore SSL errors, sets the user agent sent to websites in place of the WebView default.

• For sites that refuse the default. Use it when a site blocks the default user agent, for example a firewall that blocks a word in the device's model name.
• Where it applies. The dashboard, external pages and the Website screensaver send it.
• Back to the default. Leave the field empty to use the WebView default.

Improvements

• Timers settings page. Timers have their own page under Household in Settings and in the remote admin, after Calendar. It holds the pills, alert and shared timer settings that were under Voice Satellite > Timers, plus Timer sound and Timer sound volume, which moved from Voice Satellite > Chimes. Fleet profiles have a new Timers category for these settings. They no longer sync with Voice Satellite, and Share with and the timer sound stay on each kiosk.
• Text to speech engine for timers. Settings > Timers has a Text to Speech group, shown with Speak when a timer ends on, to pick the Home Assistant text to speech engine, language and voice that speak the timer phrase, as Alarms has. With no engine picked, the first text to speech engine Home Assistant has speaks it. Until now the phrase was spoken with the voice of Assistant 1.
• Timer pills are opt in. Show timer pills is now Show timers as pills and is off by default, so timers open the full screen view. Every kiosk moves to the full screen view on this update, whatever the switch was set to. Turn it on to get the floating pills back. Show finished timer pills and Show the name on the alert now apply to the pills only.
• Improved "Hey Jarvis" vsWakeWord model. Retrained several new native accents like German, French and kids voices plus additional augmentations.

Fixes

• Images still resized on the GPU on devices that draw with OpenGL ES (#1433). Resizing an image on the GPU fails on some Mali drivers and closes the app with "Must be able to encode GL commands without error" in logcat. Two cases still went to the GPU: a Now Playing cover smaller than 160 pixels, which radio station logos often are, and an animated image or one Android cannot read. Both are now decoded at their own size and scaled when drawn.
• Kiosk left running with no screen after Android restarted it (#1433). Android can start the app's process with no screen, for example after a force stop or a second crash within two minutes of the first. Home Assistant stayed connected, but nothing was on screen and the camera and RTSP stream stayed off until someone opened the app. With Auto-reload on error on, the kiosk now opens within five seconds of such a start if it was on screen when its last process ended. This needs Display over other apps.
• RAM shown as 0 free on devices with an old kernel. A kernel older than 3.14 does not report available memory, so the RAM tile on the remote admin's Overview read "0.0 GB free", Device info showed a low memory tag and the RAM available sensor in Home Assistant read 0. The value is now estimated from the free memory, the file cache and the reclaimable kernel memory. Seen on a Galaxy View (SM-T670) running LineageOS 23.2.