I built a lightweight panel to revive old tablets for Home Assistant dashboards
Old iPads are often left behind when it comes to modern smart home dashboards. The Home Assistant mobile app doesn’t support older iOS versions any more, and even the web interface frequently fails to load properly.
Instead of trying to force the full HA UI to run on these devices, I wanted something that fits their limitations. Many people use VNC or remote-browser setups to work around this, but those solutions require extra services, extra resources, and still feel sluggish on aging hardware.
So I experimented with a different idea: what if the tablet only handled a simple, purpose-built interface, while all the heavy lifting stayed on the server side? The heavy work is efficiently handled by a lightweight Rust backend.
That led to a lightweight app that talks directly to the Home Assistant API and displays only the essential controls and information in a clean, fast UI tailored for legacy devices.
The result: older tablets can once again serve as responsive, dedicated smart home control panels — with almost no overhead
I’m all for repurposing old hardware but I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a sec…
Why? What is the benefit of your solution that makes it worth the time/setup/maintenance/etc vs creating a dedicated native dashboard that has super basic native cards with no graphics (like you show in the first post)?
I’ve tested an Amazon 10HD 2017 gen 7 (very old, very slow) and it lags with complex dashboards (video feeds, auto-entities cards, a dozen cards on view, etc) but for basic stuff, even more complex than what you show, it is fine.
Yup. iPad mini from 2012 here. It is snappy because there are not much apps it could run these days - other than the stock software, and the Safari would struggle to load even the dashboard log-on screen.
@orange-assistant it is Android Jelly Bean on that particular Tablet. I have not been able to update the Webview. I had many years out of it now retired.
I don’t stuff around with tablets for wall displays, they are built to be mobile. But this may be an option for some people out there.
Mobile Phone (when I am out)
Lenovo Tablet (when Travelling)
Google Nest Displays (smaller screens around the house)
Android 4.x - real oldtimer! But depending on your device even if the manufacture dropped your device support with android their always is a chance that the community keeps the device afloat. Got some over 10 years old S4 phone which also was shipped with android 4 but supports android 14 with a custom ROM and all new shiny stuff that comes along with it. Only problem is, if you buy new devices you can’t know how good it will be supported (how much ownership you have in the future) - hence we always buy used (cheap) devices with maximum ownership and longevity.
This is an Asus Trio. Android in the screen portion and Intel i7 Windows in the base. I have looked. The base still works fine. I don’t need it at all and got many years of use out of it. I have enough screens in the house
