Hi, I’m just wondering if the older Polymer UI will be phased out in newer versions of Home Assistant now Lovelace is default?
Or will it continue to work and get updates in the future?
Thanks
I think you are best off to migrate to Lovelace as it will be the new pretty pony that gets all the attention.
I am in the same process; and feel Lovelace is a lot more work to get something reasonable but does have a lot more potential to do really nice things.
I agree that Lovelace is the way to go, but I think I have heard somehwere that it doesn’t play well on older Android devices? I am running some Android 4 devices on my walls (Wink relays) and don’t want to not be able to use them.
I’ve found it to be amazing… I always felt I was trying to trick the ‘old’ UI into doing what I wanted before lovelace. The fact that restarts are not required is worth the price of admission alone to me. I can name things what I want without renaming the entity, change the icons at will, I spend a Sat morning a month ago setting up my system in lovelace and couldn’t be happier! I hope you eventually find the same!
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Well I do now have Lovelace kind of working, with some more tinkering I could fix the small issues. However if the old Polymer UI continues to work in future I’m going to stick with Polymer as it does what I need it to.
However if supporting the old Polymer UI causes issues for the devs and it’s easier for them to remove it or drop support for it in furure versions then I’ll spend the extra time tinking with Lovelace and fix the issues that I have.
I agree that Lovelace is the way to go, but I think I have heard somehwere that it doesn’t play well on older Android devices? I am running some Android 4 devices on my walls (Wink relays) and don’t want to not be able to use them.
I’ve found Polymer works better than Lovelace on my older Amazon Kindle Fire and Apple iPad devices, however for tablets I’ve found Tileboard UI is a really nice solution.
I’ve found it to be amazing… I always felt I was trying to trick the ‘old’ UI into doing what I wanted before lovelace. The fact that restarts are not required is worth the price of admission alone to me. I can name things what I want without renaming the entity, change the icons at will, I spend a Sat morning a month ago setting up my system in lovelace and couldn’t be happier! I hope you eventually find the same!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not hating on Lovelace at all, It’s really nice the interface updates as soon as the config files update, it seems to deal better with caching better than Polymer also. If I wasn’t already using Tileboard then I’d probably try and use Lovelace as a fullscreen UI on my Tablet devices.
However I’m used to the way Polymer works, I use groups and customisations with also allows me to update names, icons, templates etc. without having to restart HA, I use ‘reload groups’, ‘reload core’ etc. which usually takes a 10 seconds, once I refresh the page I can see my updated UI without having to restart Homeassistant.
Having to wait to reboot after every UI change is pretty horrid, been there done that! 
I don’t really intend for this to turn into a Lovelace vs Polymer discussion, they both have benefits and drawbacks, I just wondered if anyone what the future plans for Polymer were, if any?
you know you don’t have to reboot? just a restart of HA will do it.
and if it’s just a change in the display then you don’t have to do that. Just reload your groups.
you know you don’t have to reboot? just a restart of HA will do it.
and if it’s just a change in the display then you don’t have to do that. Just reload your groups.
Yep I’m now using groups and customize and I don’t even need to restart HA when making changes, just use the reload buttons in ‘Configuration reloading’.
Before I discovered groups and customize I used to spend a lot of time waiting for restarts, that was a pretty horrible way to test UI changes.