Unlock the full potential of your self-hosted Home Assistant instance with the ever-evolving Android companion app! For over two years, the community has tirelessly enhanced this essential tool, transforming it from a simple viewer into a powerful control center for your smart home server. Now, with a dedicated Android developer on board, the app is accelerating its pace of innovation. Discover recent breakthroughs, upcoming features, and how this robust application empowers your home automation journey, ensuring seamless local control and unparalleled flexibility.
The Power of Self-Hosted Home Automation with Home Assistant Android
The Home Assistant companion app for Android just keeps getting better with every release, and recently, it gained some dedicated support to help accelerate its development. Several months ago, I (Timothy Nibeaudeau, also known as @TimoPtr) joined the Open Home Foundation as our dedicated Android developer 🎉.
It’s been over two years, and hundreds of thousands of installs, since we’ve published a dedicated update for our community on the development of the app, and I’d like to give you a quick update on recent improvements and what’s coming next.
A New Era: Dedicated Android Development for Your Smart Home Server
In the beginning, all of Home Assistant’s official companion apps were developed by the community in their spare time, with many still being part-time projects. It’s incredible the work they put into building these apps. This gives you not just the ability to view your Home Assistant instance on the go (or around the house) and takes advantage of many of the sensors available on the device while providing rich notifications to users.
The Android app alone has seen over 2,700 contributions! It’s a lot of work keeping up with Android versions, new capabilities of Home Assistant, and bug fixes. This app doesn’t just support Android phones and tablets but also devices they connect to, specifically Android Auto, Android Automotive, and Wear OS.
Unprecedented Growth and Community-Driven Innovation
They did all this work while reaching nearly 1.5 million installs, with over 6 million total installs over the years. There are 400,000 daily active users and 1 million monthly active users. The phone app also has a very nice 4.3-star rating on the Play Store and 2,800 stars on GitHub 🤩. This feedback really helps us improve.
It’s been over a year and a half since the Apple companion apps gained a full-time developer with the addition of the amazing Bruno Pantaleão 😎. Around the same time as Bruno was hired, we began looking for an Android developer, and let’s say that took a little longer.
My name is Timothy Nibeaudeau, and as mentioned at the start, I’m your new dedicated Android engineer. As someone who has been using Home Assistant since 2018, I’m passionate about open source and smart home technology. I’ve been working in software development for nearly a decade, developing apps for all sorts of projects from medical-grade IoT products to smart toothbrushes 🪥.
I am committed to bringing my talents to the project, but I cannot do it alone. The community is what makes Home Assistant special, and together, we can achieve even more. Specifically, I’d like to thank @dshokouhi, @jpelgrom, and @JBassett for their years of work making this app what it is today!
I’d also like to thank you! Your support (by subscribing to Home Assistant Cloud and buying official hardware) allows the Open Home Foundation to hire dedicated developers. Dedicated developers keep development focused, helping the community to work together in delivering the feature they’re passionate about.
Enhancing Your Home Automation Experience: Recent App Milestones
Like I said at the top, it’s been a long time (over two years 🫢) since we’ve published a blog highlighting the improvements made to the Android app. You’ve probably been enjoying these new features for some time, but in case you missed it, here are some of the biggest improvements made by the community over that time.
Advanced Sensor Integration and Local Data Privacy
- Health Connect sensors linked to your Android phone have been added, including heart rate, fitness data, and glucose levels (as always, you have complete control over what you share with your Home Assistant instance, and that data stays local).
Transforming Device Interaction: From Assist to Android Auto
- By working with Android natively, Assist can now replace your phone’s (or Wear OS devices’) assistant.
- There are now more Android Auto sensors, like speed and remaining range.
Streamlined Setup and Enhanced User Interfaces
- You can now set the Home Assistant app as your device’s default launcher, which is great for wall panel setups. This is a unique tip for self-hosters looking to repurpose old tablets into dedicated `home automation` control panels, providing an immersive, always-on interface.
- We’ve updated our widgets to support some of the new features, like To-do lists.
- Wear OS has had its Tile capabilities improved and a new thermostat tile was added.
- A simpler way to connect Wi-Fi compatible devices to your home network (such as the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition) using Improv Wi-Fi over Bluetooth (an open standard for connecting devices to Wi-Fi using Bluetooth, built by the Open Home Foundation).
- The Z-Wave device onboarding experience has been improved with the addition of a QR code scanner.
- We’ve also improved the speed and stability of the app.
- It’s now easier than ever for new contributors to jump in and start helping with the app (much more on that below 👇).
For a full list of the app’s capabilities, check out our breakdown of the companion apps from the companion documentation.
What’s Next: Future Innovations for Self-Hosters
In our latest update of the Android app 2025.7.1, we’ve added a couple of useful features. Including a new basic invite flow, which will be shared between Android and iOS, adding a good layer of consistency between our most-used companion apps. The idea is to make it much more seamless to add new users or set up new devices (no need to type the URL in your Android Automotive device!).
Unifying Experiences: Invite Flows and My Links Enhancements
We’ve also made My Links work better. If you’re unfamiliar with My Links, they’re those cool links (that anyone can make) that bring you right to an integration, blueprint, add-on, or settings page. They have always worked great on desktop, but up until recently, they were a bit clunky to use on mobile. Now you can get to the link’s destination with a single click.
Maximizing Screen Real Estate: Edge-to-Edge Support
Android has many different screen sizes and layouts, and we’re working to better leverage them with edge-to-edge support. Our recent update has edge-to-edge working on Android native UI elements like the settings page, and we’re looking to implement them elsewhere in future updates so we can make the most of your screen real estate.
Important Update for Android Users: Supporting Longevity
A huge percentage of our users are on pretty new versions of Android, but we want to support as many older devices as possible.
One significant change on the horizon is ending support for Android 5.0 and 5.1 (also known as Android Lollipop, released in 2014… it had a good run 🫡). Google has announced that starting in June 2025, many AndroidX libraries will require a minimum of Android 6.0 (API 23). Google has already updated Firebase Cloud Messaging to require this as well. This means we will need to stop supporting Android 5.0 and 5.1 (API 21 and 22) to keep up with new features and security updates. Less than 0.3% of installs are on Android versions below API 23 (Android 6.0), and we always work to keep older devices working, but sometimes our hand is forced. If you are using an older device, the app will not be removed, but you will not receive new updates once we make this change. We plan to make one final release for these older versions before support ends. This release is expected before the end of the summer, so you will have the latest updates available for your device before we move on.
Join the Mission: Contributing to Open-Source Home Automation
We want to make it easier for you to contribute, whether you are a seasoned developer or just getting started. This includes making the contribution journey smoother and giving people an easy place to start. We’ve even compiled a list of “first issues” to tackle for prospective developers looking to help out. We’ve started work on dedicated Android developer documentation, which will give in-depth information about the inner workings of this app.
Empowering Developers: Simplified Contribution
We’ve made many behind-the-scenes changes to improve the developer experience (defining best practices, linters for faster/automated feedback, and continuous integration for quicker feedback on PRs). Our focus is always on improving stability, reducing crash rates, and catching issues early. One example of this is our new fail-fast approach, which has already helped us catch and fix issues early.
We want more Android native/exclusive features while also balancing the need to keep parity between the Android and iOS companion apps (the iOS app is excellent, and each app’s community is learning so much from each other).
Your Role in Shaping the Future
The companion app for Android is a community effort, and your help makes a real difference. Here is how you can get involved:
- Provide feedback! The easiest way to do this is by commenting on our release notes.
- Answer questions on our community forum.
- Help us translate the app!
- Help with coding. We’ve made it easier than ever for you to contribute to the companion app, so check out our GitHub repository for more details.
Thanks again for making all this possible. I look forward to your help making this app even more amazing!
FAQ
<h3>Question 1: What unique advantages does the Home Assistant Android app offer for self-hosting users?</h3>
<p>Answer 1: The Home Assistant Android app provides deep integration with your device's sensors (like Health Connect data), enabling hyper-personalized automation directly from your phone. It supports rich notifications, allows replacing your phone's default assistant with Home Assistant's Assist for local voice control, and can even turn old tablets into dedicated `home automation` wall panels by acting as a default launcher.</p>
<h3>Question 2: How does the app ensure data privacy for self-hosted instances?</h3>
<p>Answer 2: A core tenet of Home Assistant and its companion app is local control. All sensor data collected by the app (e.g., Health Connect data) stays local to your Home Assistant instance by default. You retain complete control over what data is shared, ensuring your personal information remains within your `smart home server` environment.</p>
<h3>Question 3: What is the significance of the new dedicated Android developer for the Home Assistant community?</h3>
<p>Answer 3: The addition of a full-time dedicated Android developer, Timothy Nibeaudeau, signifies an accelerated focus on app refinement and innovation. This dedicated resource ensures quicker implementation of new features, enhanced stability, and better alignment with new Android OS capabilities, ultimately providing a more robust and reliable experience for users of their `self-hosted` Home Assistant setups.</p>