I’m seeing a lot of tutorials about installing a proprietary kiosk browser app on tablets to build a wall panel instead of the obvious choice of just using the companion app.
When asked the obvious question “why?” the answers usually range from nebulous “slow, laggy” complaints (which is somewhat unclear to be because behind the scenes it always boils down to a web app running in a browser widget) to some concrete stuff that seems to be missing from the companion app (although it already exposes a ton of sensors from the device as opposed to an ordinary web browser and as an app it should be able to implement the same OS-level interfaces as any other competing installable kiosk app).
My questions therefore are:
What exactly is missing in the companion app?
Can this be fixed?
Is it desirable and/or already on the roadmap to fix this and thereby get rid of the need for proprietary helper apps? If not: Why not?
I use Fully Kiosk Browser because it makes it easy to lock down the tablet and prevent misuse (it doesn’t prevent misuse of HA - you’ll need the HACS Kiosk mode for this). In addition:
You can have the screen turn on automatically when there is motion
All of that can be done without Kiosk nowadays.
I have used half-a-dozen tablets as HA frontend, and never needed anything above the HA companion app. I tried once to use Kiosk, and it actually made things more complicated.
There might be corner cases where Kiosk is needed, I don’t say, but mostly, people are using Kiosk by habit, from a time when there was no app at all, or basic ones.
Seconding only using the HA app. I’ve never found something I couldn’t do with it for my tablets. I tried kiosk once for the media player piece, but it didn’t work well on my device and I found squeezelite a much better solution for my needs.
If you use the integration with the browser, you can now access the tablet’s camera. Not sure how much use this is, though - you can view the room remotely but I don’t think the integration allows you to save the video.