What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.8.32
A new diagnostics sensor for catching a kiosk left behind another app, plus two fixes: the rotation crossfade stops blinking through transparent cards, and cameraless devices stop burning CPU on a camera service they never had.
New: Foreground app sensor (#192)
- The MQTT device's diagnostics gain a Foreground app sensor: which app is on the device's screen, with the package name as the state (stable across languages and renames, so automations match on it safely) and the human-readable name in a
labelattribute. An automation can now notice the kiosk sitting behind another app and, say, bring it back to the front after a couple of minutes. - It updates within a few seconds of an app opening over the kiosk or the kiosk returning, and once a minute otherwise. Identifying other apps needs Android's Usage access grant, which gets its own row in the Permissions Manager in the device settings and the remote admin alike; without it the sensor still reports the kiosk's own package while the kiosk is frontmost, and unknown when it is not.
Fix: The rotation crossfade no longer blinks through transparent cards
- Card gaps and cards with transparent backgrounds showed the outgoing view at full opacity through the dissolve, and that leftover content blinked out the moment the views swapped. The outgoing view now fades down beneath the incoming one on a slight stagger, so those regions dissolve to the dashboard background instead.
Fix: Devices without a camera no longer burn CPU retrying a missing camera service (#193)
- The camera library the app moved to in v2026.8.20 keeps a persistent watch on the platform's camera service once it initializes, and on hardware whose ROM ships no camera service at all (e-ink tablets, some LineageOS ports) that watch makes Android retry the missing service every second, forever, spamming the log and pegging a weak processor at 100%.
- The camera features now ask the lower-level camera API first, and on a device that enumerates no cameras the camera library is simply never started: the camera settings say plainly that no camera is available, and nothing retries anything. No permission changes needed.