2026.9 Beta week

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A general reminder: Beta week is not designed to fully overhaul a new feature, but to identify bugs that may be introduced with the update.

If you have an issue, please let us know here! However, the developers are very active in the #beta channel of our Discord server during Beta - it’s good to hop in there if you can. To ensure things are addressed in a timely manner, be sure to also submit issues on GitHub in their proper space:

Here are this month’s Beta notes! Everything about this release is themed around improving the little things, imo. GitHub was down yesterday, so this beta release was pushed out a bit late, which delayed me getting this posted (apologies to those who wait for this every month :sweat_smile:).

There is a known issue where some users are getting hung on a loading page after updating. Doesn’t seem to be everyone, but prepare a backup of 2026.8.x before you update just in case. I’ll update here once I know that’s resolved.

This :backhand_index_pointing_up: is now resolved. If you are still seeing loading issues on b2 or up and using Proxmox, be sure to change your CPU type to x86-64-v2-AES and give it a reboot.

Here are my cliff notes for this month’s release, in order of my excitement:

  • The automation options around the Sun integration continues to be my favorite improvements we’ve made recently. This release we’re finishing up that work with the introduction of golden hour, blue hour, and polar sun options.

  • I’ve been a huge advocate for accessibility for most of my professional career, which is why the new accessibility for charts feature is something I’m very excited about. My son is now keen on using this to make music solely from Home Assistant. :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

  • To carry on the work for Home Assistant Cloud’s presence in Home Assistant, signing up for Cloud has a clearer start page now. See what benefits you get by purchasing a Cloud subscription up front. And when you verify your email address, Home Assistant will automatically log you in. :ok_hand:

  • Access your Matter map easier! You get the full picture of your Matter network now. And if your Matter server is a bit older, you will see a message letting you know it’s not supported yet rather than the entire map just failing.

  • We’ve improved the Security dashboard by adding Active alerts for when something needs your attention and a new Favorites section to pin the entities you care about the most. This was a community-designed concept! :clap:

  • We upgraded both History and Activity by adding in a Sources pane. The date range picker is now also a single pill and long entity names on the History timeline will truncate instead of being cut off.

  • Keeping with this theme of small but amazing improvements, Activity now shows you why something changed instead of simply what changed.

  • But wait, there’s more! The tile card has three new ways to control an entity without opening the more-info dialog. Lights get Light effect, vacuums get Vacuum fan speed, and Target humidity will now work with Climate entities.

  • At a glance you can now see how full your network storage is in the Storage page.

  • Modbus is getting the groundwork towards improvements to remove the burden of understanding a Modbus device’s protocol on every user. This one is a bit too technical for me, but I’m sure a lot of you here will understand this pain. :sweat_smile:

  • Serial is now joining the infrared and radio frequency panels under Settings! :tada: This finishes the work from a roadmap opportunity for these three getting their own home in Home Assistant.

  • New integrations are a constant in our monthly releases, and this month we have another hefty chunk of them being added: Besen, Collection image, Flow-it, Hot Spring, ISEO Argo BLE, LibreNMS, NexBlue, Ridder HortiMaX Pro, Samsung TV via ExLink, Silla Prism, Sofar Inverter Modbus, Specialized Turbo, and Tonewinner. We also have several new virtual integrations for Midea, implemented by chemelli74. Welcome to all the new integration owners who put the hard work into getting these into Core, and massive thanks to chemelli74 for improving the experience for various Midea device owners. :clap:

  • Noteworthy improvements to existing integrations lists out a bunch of changes again this release, so let me just pull the ones that I think are the most interesting: Tuya has support for the HCDD device category, Shelly cameras are fully supported, Roborock has dock controls, SwitchBot Cloud supports both the Permanent Outdoor Lights and Curtain4 motor, KNX weather and select entities can be created in the UI, Proxmox VE has a button to pause a VM, VIZIO SmartCast supports Crave portable speakers, Environment Canada radar images can be smoothed for less blocky images, Mealie added automation actions to update and delete mealplan entries, IOmeter added new entities for three-phase electricity meters, Green Planet Energy has a get_prices action, and to cut off this incredibly big paragraph, MQTT has gained its own dashboard on the Settings page.

  • We had 5 integrations achieve new quality scale levels - 3 reached Platinum, 1 reached Gold, and 1 reached Silver. Excellent job getting these integrations rated, devs! :partying_face:

  • We have three new integrations now available to set up from the UI: Flexit, Netio, and Remember The Milk.

  • We say farewell to the VLC integration this release (VLC via Telnet still remains as an option, though).

  • Other noteworthy changes:

    • Template got some more love thanks to petro
    • Button triggers will now fire from button helpers in addition to physical device buttons
    • Automation traces now show which entities, devices, and areas each step targeted
    • Cover open, close, and set position actions have an optional speed parameter for those covers that support it
    • Restart confirmation dialog will now list the automations and scripts currently running
    • Energy dashboard now labels individual devices with their device name
    • Dashboards can have their background set in the UI via a Background tab instead of only through YAML
    • Searching the media browser now also reaches media players with their own libraries instead of only sources

  • The list of integrations impacted by backward-incompatible changes includes changes to Flexit Nordic (BACnet), KNX, LLM APIs, Persistent Notification, UniFi Protect, Update, Vacuum, and Z-Wave JS. Check out the full details for each item you use to ensure that you’re not impacted before updating.

There are a couple Developer blog posts related to this release:

The build is available now - happy testing, friends! :tada:

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I’m one of the people that was hit by the load screen bug, so I will wait for the next beta release before trying to install this again.

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OH YEAH I TOTALLY FORGOT THAT THERE IS A NEW LABS FEATURE, TOO. It’s not yet in the release notes, which made it totally slip my mind. :grimacing:

Nabu Casa is working on improving Speech-to-text! You can enable it in Labs (once updated, of course).

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A fix didn’t make b1, just so you know.

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I know. I’m over in the Beta channel on Discord right now, as well as following the issues on Github. I also figure it’s something that will require updates to the ProxMox guides to correct if I’m reading things right.

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The restart confirmation dialog now lists the automations and scripts currently running, instead of a vague warning that some might be interrupted. The list updates live as they start and stop. Thanks, @karwosts, @MindFreeze, and @NoRi2909!

Very nice idea!

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Morning @MissyQ
I am fully aware that it is impossible to showcase all new features in the release blog, but this time I had expected to see at least a short notice about better support for sub-devices. While following the commit history on a daily basis, I had seen passing by a series of cool pull requests about this topic. There were nowhere screenshots included, so I am now very curious how these sub-devices are now visualized in the frontend. It would be nice if you could consider to add this to the beta release notes, to give it at least a bit of love :wink:

Thanks!
Bart

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Sub devices are not new. They just allow a device to create multiple devices in HA. In HA they will just appear as a device.

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Hi @petro

Thanks! Yes I am aware that sub-devices are not new, which is why I wrote better support.

The current representation in the frontend was rather confusing for me, so I was very relieved that this release a number of pull requests popped up to improve this (e.g. 53619, 53766, 53617, …). Really looking forward to this feature. So I was a bit surprised it was nowhere mentioned in the release notes, and thought perhaps it was overlooked by accident.

Anyway just mentioning it, and fine for me if it is not added to the notes…

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Maybe, if you’re the sort of person that feels they need to know this. To me the old “vague” message provided the required information. This is another feature that could really use the option to retain the old behavior if someone would prefer that old behavior.

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Why though? The previous message showed up irrespective of whether you had any running automations or not. From what I can tell, this one shows up only when you DO have running automations.

It doesn’t take anything from your previous workflow & provides more info only if necessary. Why would you require an option to bring back the old behaviour?

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My read was as ShadowFist’s, only downside is a little more information on the dialogue (if that bothers you), but potential upside, if for example you are reminded that a specific automation is running in the background that is better not to interrupt. Maybe just let it finish, then proceed to restart…

Now a change that adds extra steps anywhere? Please give me an option to revert or customize that.

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In my case I have a couple of automations that trigger every second. It will be a bit odd, because I will likely see those every time. It might be more of an annoyance than anything else, but I’m just mentioning it.

In reality, I only restart via the command line and never use the UI for restarts or to reload all configs, because those behaviours are subtly different from a proper restart (I run the container), but what I said above is still likely to annoy someone.

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We agree on having the option to choose what behavior we get from a particular feature, even if we don’t agree whether or not this feature specifically deserves such a choice. I don’t see it (the restart showing whether or not there are automations and scripts running) adding value for me personally because I don’t need to know that information.

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I don’t see it adding value because on my system it will LITERALLY always be running. I’m triggering off all kinds of stuff for my room manager. It’s literally just noise for me.

Me: yes I know automations stop. And I said restart you silly computer stop bothering me.

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As im not in Beta, i haven’t seen it, But Hey!, it’s just another Click
Does anyone have experience of other System/Apps where you have to Click 5 times to restart ?

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dashboard in browser and mobile android app is constantly reloasing. from domain but also from nubu casa. logs do not mention strange things for as fas I can see. other people no issues?

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It isn’t actually another click - it’s just an update to the messaging that would warn you vaguely that it’ll stop automations or scripts without any further information.

If you’re using Proxmox, that should be resolved now. I stated how to resolve it in my original post here in an edit. :backhand_index_pointing_down:

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Thanks missy! I tried it indeed, but still continous reloading of the dashboards. I think it’s an incompatible integration or component. but not sure what yet :stuck_out_tongue: