What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.11.9
This release shows when a plugin has a newer release and gives video calls more room for the picture. It also fixes plugin overlays that disappeared after a restart, streamed answers that started over, popups in the start URL and several crashes.
New Feature: Plugin update notices
- Plugin update notices (#1324). Plugin updates are now checked a minute after the app starts and every 12 hours. A plugin with a newer release shows its new version in Plugin Manager and gets a row under Needs attention on the remote admin Overview. Update opens the usual review. Plugin updates never install automatically.
Improvements
- Video calls show more of the picture. The call buttons now fade out with the kiosk's name 3 seconds after a call connects. Tap the screen to bring them back. They stay on screen while a call rings and while Hold to talk is held.
- Video calls use a black background. The area around the picture is now black in every theme.
- Fewer false Hey Jarvis wakes on vsWakeWord. The Hey Jarvis model now needs a closer match to parts of the phrase before a wake counts.
- Crash reports can show a thread leak. A small number of installs run out of threads and crash in a loop, and the reports could not show why. A report now samples up to 2,048 threads instead of 256 and includes the leading letters of any thread name shared by 8 or more threads. Other names stay grouped as other, and no address or URL in a thread name is sent.
Fixes
- Plugin overlays no longer vanish after a restart with the screen off (#1328). If a plugin restarted while the screen was off, its overlay could stay at one pixel and disappear with no error until the plugin was restarted again. The same could happen on a lit screen if the restart fell between two frames. Native plugin screensavers had the same problem and could keep showing the view from the stopped plugin. A new plugin session now always builds a new view.
- Streamed answers no longer start over after a pause (#1323). If a conversation agent spoke a short sentence and then ran a tool for more than 8 seconds, the sentence played twice before the answer. The sentence now plays once, right away and in full, and the answer follows when it is ready.
- Going home keeps a popup hash in the start URL (#1327). Since 2026.11.8, Return to home dashboard view and the screensaver closed a popup named by the start URL, such as a Bubble Card popup, and never opened it. Both now land on the view with its hash, as the Dashboard menu entry does. Last view in Now Playing and the return from the Home Assistant Dashboard screensaver bring back a popup that was open. A start URL with no hash works as before.
- Search no longer leaves a plugin's settings page marked as open. If you searched in the remote admin from a plugin's page, the plugin was still told its page was open while the results covered it.
- Video calls no longer crash on Android 9 and older. If the other kiosk's camera turned off or the call ended before the first frame of video arrived, the app crashed. The same could happen with the self view.
- A crash on the microphone thread with software echo cancellation. The app could crash when a sound stopped playing at the exact moment the microphone read the list of active players.
- A rare graphics driver crash on OpenGL ES devices (#921). When a drawing surface was replaced while a dashboard was on screen, a buffer could be created with no graphics context and crash the app on a later frame. Seen on a Meta Portal Go and a Xiaomi Pad 5. The context is now released as soon as the old surface is gone.
- Updates no longer leave a Meta Portal without its sensors and mic. On Android 10 with Kiosk Satellite as the home app, an update could leave the app running with no working light sensor or microphone and with the Kiosk Satellite Service stopped until the next restart. The device's other launcher now shows during a silent update and Kiosk Satellite reopens when the install finishes. If the problem still happens, for example after an install over adb, the app restarts once.