What's new in Kiosk Satellite v0.6.0-beta
New: Working downloads, with in-app feedback
Downloads from the dashboard now actually work: clicking a file (an APK from GitHub, a camera clip) hands it to Android's download manager. And because the kiosk hides the status bar, feedback is shown in the app itself: a "Downloading" message when it starts and a "downloaded" message with an Open button when it finishes. Open launches the file with the right app, so a downloaded APK goes straight to the package installer. This works even while the screensaver is showing.
New: Crash recovery on low-memory devices
On devices with very little RAM (NSPanel Pro, Echo Show), Android can kill the WebView's rendering process under memory pressure, classically right when the screen wakes from the screensaver, and until now that took the whole app down with it. Kiosk Satellite now catches this and rebuilds the WebView in place: the dashboard reloads and the kiosk carries on instead of crashing.
New: Logcat viewer in App Logs
App Logs (on the device and in the remote UI) now has a dropdown to switch between Kiosk Satellite's own logs and the Android system log (logcat), which is where OS-level events like renderer kills and out-of-memory conditions show up, invisible to the app log. Checkboxes filter by Errors, Warnings and Info, with Errors and Warnings shown by default so a crash report can be copied without flooding it with hundreds of routine lines.
New: Page interaction API
A new JavaScript API for dashboards and custom cards: window.kioskSatellite.setInteractionActive(active, reason) tells the kiosk that something on the page needs the screen, which holds off the screensaver and dashboard view rotation until it is released. The Voice Satellite integration uses it to keep the screen up during voice interactions, timers, media playback and announcements. Documented in docs/js-api.md.
Improved: Dashboard view rotation
The rotation feature got an overhaul for reliability:
- Rotation now starts from the first view in the list instead of skipping it.
- It no longer rotates behind the screensaver or while the app is in the background, so it cannot silently churn views (or wake pages) you are not looking at.
- Views that need a full page load are remembered and loaded that way on later passes, removing the periodic flash of half-rendered pages.
- The next view is fully navigated before it is revealed, so switches look instant.
- Voice interactions, timers and announcements pause rotation for their duration.
Bug Fixes
- CPU temperature on some phones showed a constant 105C: thermal trip-point pseudo-sensors are now excluded from the reading.
- Remote UI screenshots from portrait devices were cropped to a sliver; the preview now follows the captured image's aspect ratio.
- The battery indicator in the remote UI header is now a proper flat icon that fills to the charge level (with a bolt while charging) instead of an emoji.
- Added missing padding above the filter telemetry text in the Optimizations settings.