It seems that the 2025.12 release may have solved setting a default dashboard for all users while allowing users to override their own dashboard. This is great, but seems to have one major flaw. What if you now want a specific dashboard based on the device you’re on? That option is now gone. I like to have my overview dashboard when I’m on my PC, but leverage my mobile dashboard on my companion app; same user account!
If I set the default dashboard to Overview (or use Auto), and then try to change the dashboard on my mobile device to use the mobile dashboard, it also changes it when viewing from my PC. Very annoying!!
We need a way to set a default dashboard based on a specific device (as override option in the user’s profile) as well as an administrative option to set a default dashboard for each user (e.g. tablet users).
I am convinced this is a bug. The developers are not stupid enough to remove this feature we all use for dedicated HA dashboard devices. Obviously it would be absurd to have a separate user for every single device that needs its own dashboard. I am the only person who uses home assistant, thus, there should only be one user.
The default dashboard for this device option used to be there. Probably lost by oversight and will be fixed
Well what ever the case, I can tell you that it’s becoming beyond frustrating!!
This option used to say ‘Pick a default dashboard for this device’. Removing this seems to defeat the purpose of creating multiple dashboards!
The only solution I can think of is to set up one user per device type so that the settings stick. Which for us is a pain, but a possibility. But my mum is 85+ and she’s having real issues with it messing up with her phone using the tablet/desktop dashboard (compressed af on mobile).
Getting her to log out and in as another user isn’t an option and I’m 400miles away, so there’s nothing I can do about it until I visit much later on in the year.
I’m glad I’m not the only one noticing this and I’m extremely surprised that the frontend devs are not seeing this as an issue.
Again, solution, (to me at least), is to provide an option per user to set a default dashboard (highlighted in the area below), while having the ability to override this default dashboard from the user profile on the specific device (original setting).
People probably add devices rarely. Oh no they had to set the dashboard for a new device… once. Now people who used that to have per-device dashboards have to make various accounts per device and use the right one in the right place, setup permissions, and deal with the other repercussions.
Im all for the addition of user default dashboards but it should have had a per-device override to keep the previous behavior as a possibility.
I had to do this quite often and it was rather frustrating. A variety of reasons… new kiosk, new phone, logged in and out again, used a local url instead of a remote url, cleared the cache…
I do agree a per-device overide would be good, but I for one am grateful for the new setting!
For me each kiosk is different so there’s no need there, they already are different accounts with device specific dashboards, and my phone is certainly different from my desktop view, which is MASSIVE. I mainly look on desktop when I’m trying to do more in-depth stuff and want a big “command center” overview. No idea how people are OK with having the same dashboard on a desktop as their phone, unless it’s more phone centric, and it just looks tiny on browser, then the switch to a different dashboard if they need more control. That’s fine I guess… but I’d think it would be more common to have a different default for browser than mobile.
Obviously to each his own, but it just seems to me they finally added the requested feature for the less common thing, while just not bothering to perserve the existing more common thing.
Just adding to this thread so it doesn't die, because this has caused me tremendous issues in current setup. Obviously the default dashboard on user-level is a great addition, but removing functionality in the sake of "simplifying" is rarely a good idea on a tinkerer-focused platform like Home Assistant, especially without a clear fallback option defined (or none at all in this case).
The per-device dashboard is (was) not a "nice to have" feature. It is quite literally needed in most cases: I can't use a separate user for myself for phone and desktop when I'm the admin and rely on specific access controls and entities that are user-based.
Imagine you have your own tablet, your own phone and your desktop computer. All vary widely in size and screen-ratio, and thus often have specific dashboards for them. Some use kiosk-mode, thus hide the sidebar entirely. I literally can't switch or access the settings on my phone currently because the dashboard is locked, and I had to go to my desktop to remove kiosk-mode so i can do an edit...
Finally, default dashboard + per-device override is likely not extremely restricting as we had the latter available in the past. A simple link between the devices registered as belonging to a user under Settings > People and a selector for each of those devices would solve this problem straight away, no ?
Not a solution, but more a workaround, but pretty easy to set up for those that are already using custom-sidebar. There is an option to set the default path for a user or a device. If you are OK with the warning shown in the IMPORTANT banner, then it is a workaround that you can use to mitigate this issue.
I was in the process of testing your solution but then it seems that 'for a device' does not mean a specific device, and rather a platform/os. As per your documentation:
E.g. ipad, iphone, macintosh, windows, android (it uses the device's [user-agent]).
The thing is all my specific single-purpose dashboards are on different Android devices. So it seams I would not be able to specifically target each one separately.
Not platform or OS. device checks the userAgent of the device and it can match whatever is contained in the userAgent. You would need to check if the userAgent of each device has something unique that you can use to identify each of them.
But you can try another approach. default_path allows JavaScript templates. So you can access any WEB APIs, try to see which WEB API allows you to identify the devices (screen size, device memory, devicePixelRatio, etc). If all the devices are the same brand/model it will be difficult though.
Luckily, contrary to my computers' browsers, it looks like most of my Android devices do have a user-agent with their model name in it, so I got it working!
Quick note for the thread that Browser Mod version 2.13.0 again supports setting default dashboard per device. This can be supported again as it uses the new feature which allows for syncing login session to the Browser ID which also fixes devices losing Browser ID (as long as the same user stays logged in).
That is a great improvement! @dcapslock, it would be great to edit this section to reflect that. Yesterday I was thinking in recommending browser-mod but as the browser id could change easily, I refrained myself because it seemed that the current approach was still storing the browser id in the localStorage, but with that improvement this should not be an issue as long as the the user stays logged in in the device, so adding that clarification would help to understand the current status.
