What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.8.80
One always-running service now keeps the kiosk alive with the screen off, the setup wizard introduces it up front on both the tablet and the remote admin, and a dead-dashboard-after-screensaver bug is gone.
Added: The Kiosk Satellite Service
- Android freezes a backgrounded process whole and the battery managers some manufacturers add kill it outright, so a few hours into the night the Home Assistant session, MQTT and everything else stopped together and the kiosk read unavailable until someone touched it. Until now only two features carried the exemption that prevents this, background listening and the ESPHome server, each with a service of its own, and the common install with neither had none.
- The app now runs a single foreground service from its first start, whatever is switched on, with one notification whose text says what it is doing. The features only add to what it declares: background listening adds the microphone, an enabled camera adds the camera (so motion detection keeps its camera through screen-off without background listening on), the Bluetooth proxy adds Bluetooth scanning, and MQTT, the ESPHome server, remote administration and the kiosk protections are listed as reasons.
- It holds the Wi-Fi lock for as long as it runs and, new, a CPU wake lock while the panel is dark, so the timers behind the keepalives fire on time instead of waiting for the next interrupt. That lock is the service's one setting, Keep the CPU awake while the screen is off, on by default, for tablets on battery to turn off.
- A new Kiosk Satellite Service page under Settings, Device, on the device and in the remote admin alike, shows whether it is running and holds its foreground exemption, the types it declares, its locks and notification, what it is keeping the process alive for, and the grants that matter for that with a button to give each one. The relaunch after a crash or a close from recents rides on the same service.
- The "Listening for a wake word" and "ESPHome active" notifications are gone, folded into the service's one notification; the two channels behind them are removed on update.
Added: The service in the setup wizard, and one wizard on both surfaces
- The wizard's first page introduces the service right under Restore from configuration file, on the device and in the remote admin alike: what it is, and its three grants (Unrestricted battery, Display over other apps, Notifications) with a button for each. The page cannot be left while one is still missing; Next names the grant in the way instead. The page's three groups now carry titles, and Remote administration is on by default.
- The two wizards now open on the same first page. The remote one used to skip its Welcome step whenever the admin password already existed and put the restore path on the Connect step instead, so the two differed in step count and layout; it now always starts with Welcome (the password only where one is still needed), and the Connect step is the Home Assistant connection alone on both.
- The wizard's Permissions page asks for the notification grant on every install rather than only with background listening.
Added: Fill the screen for the Home Assistant Media screensaver
- The last photo mode without it. Photos served from Home Assistant's media browser get the same treatment as Local Media, Photo Gallery and Immich Media: a photo shaped close enough to the panel is enlarged edge to edge, and portrait and square photos keep their full frame over an enlarged, blurred and dimmed copy of themselves instead of black bars. On by default, like the other three; videos and camera streams keep their frame.
- The blurred backdrop is drawn once per photo at a fraction of the panel's size, so a Ken Burns drift over it costs the weak tablets kiosks run on nothing extra, and a photo is now handed off once it has loaded, so the transition runs over a picture rather than a blank that pops in. The mode's settings moved to their own Home Assistant Media screensaver page, like every other photo mode's.
Fixed: A dashboard that stayed dead after a screensaver was dismissed
- The screensaver freeze hides the dashboard's native view to stop it compositing under the overlay, and the app keeps its own note of whether it did. The two could fall out of step, with the view hidden while the app believed it was not, after a freeze the app judged had not taken; from then on every dismissal skipped the reveal because there was nothing to reveal by the app's books, and the page kept running, connected and answering, behind a view that never came back.
- The native side now reports the views it matched rather than the ones it changed, so a view already hidden counts as frozen and thaws normally, and the edge from a screensaver that covered the dashboard to one that does not always asks for the reveal, which costs nothing on a view that is already visible.
Added: Copying the ESPHome encryption key
- Double-clicking the key in the remote admin selected only part of it, since a double-click stops at the
+,/and=characters a base64 key is full of, and a partial key pasted into Home Assistant fails with a generic "unable to connect". A Copy button next to the field now copies the whole key, and works on the plain-http address the admin is usually opened on. The Bluetooth proxy's required permissions also moved onto the Bluetooth Proxy page, right above Nearby devices.