We recently setup a HomeAssistant server at home to fully control everything we possibly can, and we are considering a wall-mounted tablet too. I’ve seen a few video’s about them demonstrating an app called ‘Fully Kiosk Browser’ and using it to lock the device into Home Assitant. Well, since I own the Home Assistant app on my phone it can track some sensors (e.g battery level, location, etc… ) that can be used within automations, and support for this drops when you would use FKB, instead of the HomeAssistant app. There is also and app called ‘Fully Single App Kiosk’, which would lock the tablet the same way into the app, but it would allow me to use the sensors for eg. an automation to warn us if someone removes it from it’s wall mount and charger. Now with all that being said, which app should I go for and why? What are the pros and cons from each?
Both Fully Kiosk Browser and Fully Kiosk App have Motion Detection and Movement Detection and also they are offering informations regarding Battery, charging state, ip, screen state and many others.
My experience with both of them is not very good. In my case the tablet became very laggy and nob responsive after a day or two when using FKB. The only solution was to stop kiosk mode, close the app and open it again. Also, the app usually crashes or freezes when streaming videos from surveillance cameras.
A month ago I’ve switched to Wallpanel which, at least for now, seems to work much better. The app does not crash, the video don’t freeze and you can set it up to publish informations on an MQTT topic that can be used in automations.
i wish i read this comment earlier! last couple of weeks i have put many frustrated hours in optimizing my dashboard with fully kiosk. Had exactly the same issues you described.
Wallpanel immediately feels so much more responsive and is also more stable. Thanks!
This is a very good question and some rather unrelated answers unfortunately
There are several youtube videos where people recommend the FKB, I would be interested if there are valid reasons not to use the Fully Single App Kiosk instead?
If there are more opinons about WallPanel, please create a new thread. This topic is clearly about Fully Kiosk.
So far people have provided feedback for the use of Wallpanel rather than Fully Kiosk, but what’s the up-/downside using those compared to running the companion app on your android based dashboard?
I use the Fully Kiosk Browser as of now. it is very stable BUT it is quite slow on my Fire 8 HD Plus Tablet. I will give WallPanel a go now to see whether it improves the performance.
I also used Fully Kiosk App too, but that crashed very often in the version I used (beginning of 2022 as far as I recall). I would love to use the native app instead of a browser site.
What prevents me of doing so is very simple: I only have the Android tablet camera as a motion sensor, so if I could expose that camera as a binary sensor to HA, that would allow me to control the screen on/off. I’m now aware of such a solution at this stage, so I’m bound to FKB or FKA or WallPanel by the look of things…
I’m also using the app and tried fully kiosk on a Fire TV (echo show). But, I cannot get animated icons to work on the device. Works on all other devices but not Amazon screens. Do you have anything animated on your dashboard ?
Another argument which is a + for FKB is when you want to play sounds on the device. FKB provides a media_player entity which works well. With the Companion app, you additionaly need browser_mod which is a great solution for displaying popups but quite complicated to configure and not very reliable, when you need the device ids. I used browser_mod until after the last HA update all browser ids have changed and I had to reconfigure all my automations. This happened more then once. So now using FK and I hope everything remains stable.
By the way: the media_player doesn’t work with browser_mod 2.0 as some users posted on GitHub.
I’ve been using Fully Kiosk and paid the 7.90€($9USD) for the pro version. I’ve been very happy with it. Initially used Fully version to display web UI for Home Assistant server, but have since moved to using Fully’s Single App version - which I have set to display the Home Assistant Companion App.
It runs flawlessly.
One of the main reasons I chose this over Wallpanel is Fully’s ability to automatically keep the tablet unlocked, and to unlock it if needed.
I’ve also rooted the tablet to control battery charging (I keep it 30%-65%), and have set Fully to automatically launch the battery charging control app I’m using.
IMO Fully was well worth the small price.
