What's New in Kiosk Satellite 2026.9.22
This release lets Now Playing share the display with your screensaver, adds an ESPHome action to launch Android apps from Home Assistant and introduces more screensaver customization. It also improves Sendspin playback timing and WebView rendering.
New Feature: Now Playing Alongside the Screensaver
- Shared Display: A new Show alongside screensaver setting under Media Player > Now Playing > Screensaver, enabled by default, keeps the screensaver beside the player in landscape or above it in portrait. Small screens keep the full-screen player.
- Photo Fill Controls: A separate Fill the screen setting controls how photos fill the screensaver panel. It defaults to Always. Choose Default to follow each screensaver's saved setting.
- Brightness and Dismissal: The shared layout follows the screensaver's brightness and detection settings. Tap the screensaver panel to dismiss both views. An optional Override screensaver brightness toggle uses normal brightness instead, including when scheduled brightness is active.
- Schedule Overrides: Each scheduled screensaver can follow the global layout setting, request the shared layout or hide Now Playing during those hours. Hiding it also prevents music from opening the view automatically while playback continues normally. Changes apply immediately and at schedule boundaries.
New Feature: Launch Apps From Home Assistant
- Launch by Package Name: The new
esphome.<node name>_launch_appaction opens an installed Android app using a requiredpackage_nameargument, such ascom.android.deskclock. It is available to Home Assistant automations and scripts when Expose kiosk entities is enabled. - Existing Kiosk Behavior: The action uses the same unpinning and configured auto-return behavior as other app launches. The App launcher overlay does not need to be enabled.
- Launch Errors: Empty package names, missing apps and other launch failures report an action error to Home Assistant.
Screensaver Improvements
- Text Drop Shadows: Separate Text drop shadow toggles for widgets and Immich metadata are enabled by default and update the display immediately.
- Lighter Default Vignettes: Widget and Immich metadata vignette defaults are now 40% instead of 80%. Saved vignette settings are preserved.
- Larger Widgets: Widget scaling now reaches 200%, up from 150%, on the device and in the remote admin.
- More Precise Screen-Off Timers: The global Turn screen off after setting and schedule overrides now use 1-minute steps from 1 to 60 minutes. A value of 0 still disables screen-off.
Playback and Performance Improvements
- Sendspin Playback Timing: Audio feedback uses the time at which playback progress was measured. The player validates Android's presentation timestamps and falls back to a smoothed playback clock when they are unreliable, retaining the last measured latency if timestamps stop working.
- Timing Diagnostics: The remote Sendspin status includes clock source, fallback reason and latency information to help investigate synchronization problems.
- WebView Rendering: Dashboard and external website views avoid an extra forced graphics layer while retaining hardware acceleration.
Fixed
- CPU Usage After Deep Sleep: CPU usage calculations exclude time spent suspended so sleep does not appear as processor activity.