Good day everyone,
The past few months I have been working on creating a native app for Android. It is progressing very fast now and it is almost ready to get tested by actual users.
Why have I created this app?
The reason is simple, Home Assistant is a project that moves very fast and unfortunately often comes with changes that break a lot of custom cards (which would then either require the card devs to update them, or require me to fix it myself). So instead I thought it was easier to check for API/websocket changes instead (as that would be a lot faster to fix). Basically it is my first real Android app and it was meant to be a test, but it got a bit out of hand and I have a lot of fun building it. And since I was already building it, I thought maybe someone is interested in having this as well. If you think this project looks a lot like HKI Elements, then you are right, it is based of my other project HKI Elements.
First:
This app does NOT collect data. Only external data is to fetch openstreetmaps (which might be replaced with something better in the future). No other data will be collected and everything stays within your own Home Assistant environment.
Core Features:
- A fully automatic UI, it can build the UI completely automatically by fetching devices you have setup inside areas as well as automatically fetching climate/sensors/security devices/camera’s/energy and batteries dashboard. If you have adaptive lighting installed it will even fetch that automatically.*
- 14 included languages!
- A fully customizable UI, there are tons of options available to customize the dashboard if you want to re-arrange it, add widgets or remove stuff that was imported automatically (or you could completely start fresh). Almost every element is customizable in a simple way.
- No YAML, no CSS, everything can be done via the UI, move things around. Predesigned buttons, widgets, sensors, graphs, popups and much more. No need for css to build a nice dashboard.
- Over 25 widgets available at launch ranging from buttons, markdown cards, calendar, weather, energy, climate, vacuum, batteries, swipe stacks, parcel delivery, waste collection and many more.
- Widgets can be placed freely on the home screen or room views, but if that isn’t sufficient then you can simply create new pages as much as you want. Some widgets are even animated.
- Animated climate, security and energy views
- A rich notification system with history, timestamps and ability to archive messages for later use which are also actionable
- Light and dark modes and customizable theme colors
- Fonts, text size, border radius styles are all configurable through the settings
- Backup and restore dashboard UI as well as cloud saves, dashboards can be easily saved and restored this way. You can store them locally, Google Cloud or your local HA instance.
- If you only use notifications, location and battery levels from your phone then you can fully replace the HA app with this one! More HA core features will be added in the future.
- A nice onboarding process which allows you to either generate dashboard automatically, start empty, restore from backup or use the family shared dashboard.
- Full entity/device search is available (and you can control any entity from the search panel as well)
- Ability to connect to multiple Home Assistant instances
- A fully featured flows/automation manager
- Global search (search for any of your devices/entities)
- Design your own popups
- Family sharing, parental controls and much more, control what dashboards your family have access to and/or restrict them from using certain widgets or views entirely.
Features that will be added in the near future:
- Car widget
- Unifi widget
- Unraid widget
- Many more features
*NOTE: For rooms and energy to work automatically you will have to setup area’s and the energy dashboard first in HA. All other stuff like climate and security and batteries will be completely automatic without any user intervention. Also media players will be fetched automatically and can be controlled from the UI as well as Spotify playlist support.
Screenshots
Videos
For videos please join the discord channel below. There are many videos showcasing the UI on the channel.
Testing
I need people that are willing to test the app and provide feedback before this gets posted to the Google Playstore.
Currently there is a closed test going on and you can send me a DM with your google email account to get early access.
Disclaimer: This project is created with help from AI-assisted development tools. I know we live in a world where there is much AI-slop. But I actually want to show you that AI can also be used to create something good and not just stupid video’s, cheap apps or dumb images. If you disagree with this, then do not install this app.
