Home Assistant

Home Assistant 2026.11 folds the community HACS store into a built-in Marketplace, with existing installs carried over, though the project warns that community-made content can access your home and data. Standalone HACS stops being supported once the release lands, expected November 4.

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Home Assistant Just Changed HACS Forever. Here's What You Need to KnowSmart Home Junkie

HACS moves inside Home Assistant 2026.11

The community store that used to be the first add-on everyone installed is now a built-in Marketplace in the 2026.11 beta. Smart Home Junkie walked through it for 38,673 viewers by Nov 2 and says the team worked on it for more than four years. Byte of Geek (37,365 views) flags the breaking changes: AdGuard Home needs 0.107.30 or newer, Uptime Kuma needs 2.0 or newer, and authentication checks get stricter for public, IPv6 and Tailscale addresses. @MarkWattTech framed it as "SO LONG HACS... HELLO @home_assistant MARKETPLACE!" and Release Alert logs four betas, 2026.11.0b0 through b3, between Oct 28 and Nov 2 on home-assistant/core, which sits at 91,928 stars and 3,430 open issues. The official 2026.11 beta release notes describe "a lot in store," including exclude targets for automations, entity names rebuilt from the device and entity together, LoRaWAN support, and 38 new integrations on top of the Marketplace. HACS's own docs say there is "nothing to download anymore": the Marketplace lives under Settings > Marketplace, keeps "the same catalog, the same repositories, and the same hacs.json," and everything already installed via HACS stays installed and keeps running during migration, per the Marketplace integration page, which also warns that Marketplace content is community-made, not built by the Home Assistant project, and can access your home, your data, and the system that runs it. Frenck's own writeup, titled "you'll barely notice," confirms standalone HACS becomes unsupported once 2026.11 lands. Smart Home Field Guide and Smart Home Assistant UK both point to a stable release expected Wednesday, November 4, with the release party livestream set for 20:00 GMT / 12:00 PT / 21:00 CET, and both outlets separately note that Matter cameras with two-way talk arrive the same release, per Matter Alpha, which describes a new Labs preview for two-way audio alongside expanded climate, cover, lighting and sensor support. Local Smart Home Guide adds that downloads migrate automatically and that the HACS maintainer first announced the move back on October 16.

Nabu Casa teases new hardware for a November 11 livestream

@home_assistant promised a way to "bring even more devices into Home Assistant on Wednesday, November 11", and that post drew 670 likes and 35,583 views. @NabuCasa added "we might just have the hardware to make that happen," confirming the stream time as "12:00 Pacific / 3:00 Eastern / 20:00 UTC / 21:00 CET." The gathered posts do not say what the hardware is. The device push extends to Works with Home Assistant, which added LEDVANCE and its 116 certified Matter devices on Oct 13. It also added Everything Smart Home's ESPHome-based Everything Presence sensors on Oct 27, a post with 309 likes and 29,434 views.

"What the Heck?!" month returns, and family access control tops the list

@home_assistant opened November's feedback drive by asking users to include the people they live with (79 likes, 7,531 views). The official blog post frames it bluntly: "For something that is literally your face, that's a bit odd, isn't it?", referencing a tidier profile page shipped back in Home Assistant 2026.10 that already lets every user, admin or not, manage their own account. On r/homeassistant the thread hit 403 points and 131 comments. The top reply, from u/fodi666 (510 upvotes), asks for "proper user access control so anyone in the house sees only what they have to." u/aalbinger (188 upvotes) wants one-tap bookmarking of controls to a personal dashboard, and u/frenck_nl (150 upvotes) notes the event runs every two years. Community Day follows on Nov 7. @balloob counts more than 90 locations and says he'll be in NYC, while @pvizeli lists a 2:00 PM Open Home Foundation meetup at Freiruum in Zug. Separately, pvizeli's Social Home added household games like chess, Go and Battleships in 2026.11.1, and he says it is simple to install on Home Assistant OS.

Frenck apologizes after a secrets-scanning issue blows up on HN

The GitHub issue "I never authorized an integration that scans my secrets" reached 251 points and 236 comments on Hacker News. Frenck posted, "My replies there were more dismissive than they should have been. My apologies," and added that the check can be turned off. Some commenters weren't mollified. janice1999 wrote, "Toxic developers turned me off Home Assistant," so this was a trust story as much as a technical one.

Old tablets and cheap screens are becoming Home Assistant dashboards

Stuff With Josh's "Keep that old tablet!" did 271,082 views and 7,662 likes, and his follow-up (47,692 views) credits it with 2k new follows. On r/homeassistant, the ESP32 touch panel got 570 points and a 3D digital twin that locates people to about 1.5 m got 505. A Samsung TV dashboard got 211, and a £10 POS display got 38. r/homeautomation's 3D-model control post added 216 more. The biggest single hit was an illustrated-house dashboard at 941 points on HN. @automated_house kept the vibe simple with "Love Home Assistant!" (7,690 TikTok views), and @purposeinpractice5 joked about saving "approximately 3 seconds of effort" after spending "47 hours programming it." @epicsystemstech (13,465 views) countered that "most homeowners just want everything to work."

Local AI arrives through MCP, with caution built in

The 2026.10 release (361 likes) added one-click AI connection, renamed Home Assistant Cloud to Home Assistant Link, and shipped 15 new integrations. Smart Home Solver's "AI in Home Assistant: Genius or Dangerous?" drew 155,795 views for a fully local MCP setup. @alexlmiller is writing up a local Claude/Codex automation guide (7,468 views, 33 replies). ki_fuchs shares a read-only optimization prompt (2,814 views), and the word "lesend" ("read-only") stops the AI from changing anything until you say so. Showcases range from a J.A.R.V.I.S Ai Assistant dashboard (3,509 views) to an Echo Dot converted into a satellite with Claude, per LavX on Nov 1.