I think I stop updating Home Assistant for atlease one year.
Everything is working now as I want but everytime I update something breaks.
Then Multi protocol zigbee / threat breaks, sometime an other device is not recognized anymore or icons are gone, etc.
I love Home Assistant but they have to many updates in my opinion. How can they do decent tests with so many updates (every month an update).
So I think I stop updating every time and do an update maybe once a year.
I do not need the latest options but I do need a stable environment.
If I only update once I year I only have to correct things that break once a year and the rest of the time my environment is stable.
The latest update broke a lot of my icons so I restored a backup and wil update next year.
Don't forget that Supervisor will always update automatically in the background. Sooner or later you'll probably find everything else has to be updated as well. But yes, there are plenty of people who don't update for a year or more. You just have to be prepared for a few messy days when you eventually do.
HA Devs have been warning people not to use multiprotocol for years due to its instability. In fact, they deprecated the official add-on last year.
If you chose to ignore them rather than get a separate dongle for each protocol, then it's hardly HA's fault.
Re the icon thing, clear your browser cache like @LiQuid_cOOled suggested.
But just imagine now if you can, the number of breaking changes you are going to have to battle through if you leave it a year
My advice always is read the release notes before updating that way you will know what is going to need fixing. Don't update till the end of the monthly update cycle, that way any bugs will have been ironed out.
If you had read the release notes you will have known
Multi protocol zigbee was deprecated 6 months ago and had plenty of time to fix the issue.
While I understand the sentiment, there is never a guarantee that the update you choose will be "stable". Even the "do the last update of the month" strategy doesn't really make sense because not all bugs that get discovered in a given month get fixed in that month... their fixes are just as likely to be rolled into the next main release.
And if you have any integrations that aren't completely local, over the span of a year you are nearly guaranteed to have something fail because of changes made upstream.
It's fine to skip updates for a month or two, but I think you are kidding yourself if you think going a whole year will save you any time or frustration... it will likely just concentrate it into a super-annoying fortnight.
It is fibe not to update all the time.
A year between updates are very risky though and the reason for that is the grace period for bigger planned changes are 6 months.
If you update within the six months, then you will get a warning about the change and can correct your setup before the change actually happens.
Men advice is to update 3 times an year with 4-5 months in between updates.
And even if everyone had all the integrations and apps installed, then you also had to test with all combinations of all the integrations and apps installed except one.
When that is handled the you would need to test all except 2 and so on.
I see this often. People come back after a year and are completely lost with compounded issues due to the monthly changes.
If the time is over a year, I usually suggest they get a good backup, reinstall HA at the current version on another drive, and restore. There are less failures that way and they have the original to fall back on be swapping the drives back…
... you'll hit into a total disaster. There's no way you'll be able to read one year of changes, correct all things in a decent time... it will take weeks to get HA into order.
I regulary do updates and i rarely hit into (unexpected) problems. But i ALWAYS read CHANGELOG, and i read it BEFORE i update. I also regulary monitor this forum for potential future breaks on hacs addons etc... a nice example is "simple thermostat" which broke in 2026.5 beta. But, a nice user (i thank him!) came and corrected it before final release.
But that's the price to pay if you use HA, i guess. Nothing is "free"...
I find more and more users which just blindly click "update" and then come "crying" on this forum...
Last year, I didn't update for ~8 months. In April 2025 (iirc), there were major changes to template triggers, but I didn't have time to address them until December. I didn't have any problems catching up. But I did read the release notes and jotted down things that might apply to me (it wasn't much, just 1 or 2 topics). I should also mention that when I update, I install versions one by one - I don't skip any. I also stopped updating in March of this year; I just needed a little break
I also manage another HA installation, which I updated for the first time about 2 years after installation, and that was about 10 months ago
Sorry guys, I'm on the other side of the looking glass!
