Until some weeks ago I’ve been using two old wall mounted iPad 4 tablets as touch panels for Home Assistant. Because of lacking hardware and browser support for 32bit iOS I recently had to replace them.
So now I use two Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.1 tablets instead. While they are working fine as wall displays in general, there is one thing, that nags me:
While I was able to permanently pin the HA UI to the tablets via the iOS guided access feature, I’m still unable to reliably keep the HA app open on the Samsung tablets at least with Android 10 OOB features. Despite excluding the app from battery saver, locking and pinning it, it still gets killed by the OS after about a day.
Do you use Android devices as wall displays and know a reliable way to keep the HA UI open? Is there any Android 10 feature I missed somehow?
While I’m not really keen into using some (sketchy…?) kiosk or child mode app to achieve this, if you know some usable app, I’m open for recommendations as well.
I have a china tablet mounted in our house entrance. I am not using the native HA app, but an Android app called “Wall panel”
It has a ton of usefull features:
just use the webinterface of HA to be displayed here. I have a user “tablet” which reduces the amount of lovelace cards and starts the HA webinterface with a certain view.
You can stream the webcam to HA
The webcam can be used as a presence detector: no Presence: screensaver (f.ex. clock) presence detected: switches to HA website
a lot of information can be transferred via MQTT to monitor the state of the tablet and its sensors
I did not fiddle around with energy settings, the app was configured to “stay open”
Thank you for your recommendations. In the last weeks I tested both apps and this is my result:
I liked Wall Panel for its focus on providing the essential functionality for using an Android tablet as a wall panel at home. It’s sleek and without bells and whistles. The settings are straight forward and easy to understand.
But the app only works flawlessly, while it is running in foreground with the display turned on. WP is essentially keeping itself active 24/7 for not being killed by the system. And it doesn’t prevent users from accidently or intentionality quitting it. This is a problem with children or guests using the panels, which don’t know immediately how to get the app back, if it isn’t running anymore for any reason.
Keeping the display on all the time (even if dimmed to minimum brightness) certainly increases power consumption and shortens life time of the devices. Also preventing children from using the tablets for all sorts of other stuff unattended is hard, after they discovered they just need to quit the app to get full access to the tablet. I tried to circumvent this with a second restricted account, but even with that, not all apps can be disabled, f.e. settings. And using a second account besides the main account on an Android tablet and needing to switch between them every time you want to use the tablet for anything else, is also far from elegant.
This is where Fully Kiosk Browser is going the extra mile. FKB is using several Android features to prevent itself from being killed accidently or intentionality.
Besides that it provides far more functionality, than needed for the purpose of using Android tablets as a wall mounted displays in your own home, even with guests or children “attacking” the devices. These countless extra features initially discouraged me from using it as you really have to invest some time to understand all the options. There are a lot settings that are far from self explanatory. If your set them wrong, the app isn’t behaving as expected.
But if you set them right, the app is working like a charm. FKB offers all the options WP does as well, but also the ones I missed from WP: The display can be turned off without the app being killed. And it can be set as the launcher app. On Android this is not a bullet proof but at least the most reliable way to really lock down the tablet to an app. And as FKB is also able to launch other apps via api or javascript calls, it’s even possible to lock down the tablet to running exactly the apps you want.
And as a little extra I’ve been happy to see import/export functions for settings in FKB which allowed me to get the second tablet up and running in no time after the first one was configured properly.
I’m pretty happy with it and I agree with you that FKB is the best solution for a wall tablet.
I managed to pass the lock screen problem and deactivate the ads.
What it nags me, is sleep mode.
When FKB switches off screen sometimes tablet doesn’t wake up.
I tried FKB motion detection & screen on / off.
Then I found the browser_mod component and tried to achieve the same with automations instead. Through browser_mod automation blackout / no blackout screen.
