What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.8.15
New: Music Assistant, one swipe from the dashboard
Music Assistant arrives in the kiosk menu this release, and the approach is deliberate: rather than build a media player of our own against Music Assistant's API, one that would forever trail the real thing and never match it feature for feature, Kiosk Satellite shows Music Assistant itself. Its interface is already excellent, already maintained by the people who build the server, and already the one your household knows from their phones, so browsing, search, the queue, playlists and radio all arrive whole, and they improve every time Music Assistant does rather than whenever we get around to copying them. What Kiosk Satellite adds is everything around it: the entry in the menu, a session that is already signed in, the dashboard kept alive and instant underneath, and a way back to it when nobody is looking.
- The kiosk menu has a Music Assistant entry that opens the Music Assistant web interface over the dashboard: the full library, search, queue, playlists and radio, exactly as they are on a phone or a laptop.
- It opens already signed in. Music Assistant keeps its own session, so the page would otherwise ask for a login every time storage is cleared; instead the long-lived token configured for lyrics is handed to the page as it loads. The token decides what the tablet can do there, so a read-only token browses but cannot queue. Signing in by hand still works and is left alone when it happens, and the token is only ever given to pages on the configured server.
- Closing it (or pressing back, or a wake word) reveals the dashboard still loaded underneath, with the voice session and the wake word untouched, because the page never left.
- The entry appears as soon as a server address is set under Sendspin, Music Assistant, and the new Show in the kiosk menu toggle there turns it off. In kiosk mode it is one of the Allowed Actions, so it can be offered in, or kept out of, the restricted quick-actions menu.
- Close after inactivity, a new slider from 0 to 60 seconds and off by default, puts the dashboard back on its own: with no touch anywhere on the Music Assistant page for that long, it closes itself. Made for the wall tablet whose visitor queues a song and walks away. Scrolling and tapping count as activity, so reading a long album page keeps it up.