What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.8.74
Settings are no longer one long scroll: the biggest pages now send their groups to pages of their own. Notifications can be drawn at any size with any Material Design Icon and lift a dimmed screensaver so they can actually be read, the Bluetooth proxy reports how many devices the kiosk is linked to and kiosk mode arms fully again on Android 7.
Changed: Settings on second-level pages
- The long settings pages no longer scroll forever. Their groups now live on pages of their own, each reached by a row that names the page and lists what is inside, so what is left on the page above is short enough to read at a glance. Home Assistant, Voice Satellite, Screen & Audio, Screensaver, Device, ESPHome and Kiosk Mode all work this way now.
Added: Bluetooth devices connected sensor (#281)
- A diagnostic sensor in the ESPHome and MQTT integrations reporting how many Bluetooth devices the kiosk is linked to right now, with their names in attributes, so a dashboard can tell whether the room's speaker or keyboard is still on the panel without walking over to it. It counts every link the adapter holds, the ones the Bluetooth proxy has open for Home Assistant included.
- It follows links as they happen rather than on the minute poll, so a device Home Assistant connects to for a few seconds, a lock taking a command through the proxy, is visible for as long as the link lasts instead of falling between two polls.
Added: Notifications lift a dimmed screensaver
- A notification arriving over a dimmed screensaver brings the panel back to its ordinary brightness while it is on screen, and lets it dim again when the last one is dismissed. Kiosks routinely run their screensaver at a few percent, which is exactly dark enough that a message arriving on it cannot be read. Only the backlight moves, so the clock, the photo or the black overlay stays where it was with the card lit on top of it. Dim and Black lift too, as does a schedule entry's own brightness.
- A new Brighten for notifications switch in the Screensaver settings turns it off, for a bedroom where a notification lighting the room at 3am is worse than missing it until morning.
Added: Any Material Design Icon on a notification (#278)
- The
iconargument takes an icon named the way Home Assistant names them,mdi:washing-machine, and draws it in place of the one the notification's type picks, in the type's own color. The whole icon set ships with the app, so anything valid in a dashboard works on the kiosk, including the older names Material Design Icons has since renamed.
Added: Notifications can be drawn larger (#278)
- The
scaleargument on the notification action, and onshowNotification, takes 1, the ordinary card, up to 4, with decimals like 2.5 in between: type, icon, padding and width all grow together, so a wall panel can push an alert that reads from the far side of a room without a full-screen takeover, and an ordinary informational note can stay small. Each notification carries its own scale, so a big one can sit above small ones in the stack.
Added: Turning remote management off asks first
- Switching Remote management off from the remote admin now confirms. It is the one switch there that takes away the page you are using, and nothing on that page can undo it, so the confirmation warns you will lose access and names the two places that can switch it back on: the device, or the Remote management switch this kiosk exposes in Home Assistant.
Fixed: Kiosk mode on Android 7 (#280)
- Kiosk mode arms fully again on Android 7 tablets. The shield that guards the top edge of the screen (the "Disable status bar" protection) was created with a kind of window Android only introduced in version 8, so older devices refused it outright even with the draw over apps permission granted, and every refusal aborted the rest of the kiosk push behind it: the home button protection, the bar watcher, the System UI guard and Lockdown Mode's own screen shield were all left unarmed, while the log filled with a window permission error a couple of times a minute.
- Both overlays now ask for the window kind their Android version accepts, and a shield the system still refuses is logged as a warning without taking any of the other protections down with it.