Home Assistant 2026.9! 🎉

I’ll be honest: Modbus has never been the flashiest part of Home Assistant. It quietly powers solar inverters, heat pumps, and energy meters, but only if you’re comfortable hand-writing your own register map in YAML, a real wall that’s kept a huge category of devices out of reach. This release finally makes room on the bus: integrations that already know how a device talks over Modbus, sharing a single connection instead of fighting over it, so you simply pick your device in the UI like anything else in Home Assistant. It won’t show up in a screenshot, but modernizing Modbus is hands-down my favorite change this release. 🔧

I’m also really looking forward to jumping on the new Cloud voice processing myself and putting it through its paces. We’re a household with a non-English main language, and if you’ve ever run a private voice assistant in one, you know exactly how fast accents and background noise trip things up. This new speech-to-text engine specifically targets those pain points, so I’m very curious to see how it holds up against my own accent. 😉

And there’s plenty more: active alerts and favorites for the Security dashboard, a shared Sources panel for History and Activity, Activity that finally explains why something changed, a brand new network map for Matter, charts you can now navigate by keyboard and sound, and 13 new integrations! 🚀

One more thing before you dive in: we’re at IFA Berlin this weekend! It’s one of the largest consumer electronics expos out there, running September 4 to 8, 2026, and the Open Home Foundation has its own booth in the Smart Home hall: Hall 1.2, stand 1.2-153. If you’re around, come find us and say hi. 👋

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

Our why as an organization is clear: to fight for privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart homes, and for every person who lives in one. But who does live in them?

In December 2024, we launched the first Home Assistant survey to find out. Our goal was simple: to make Home Assistant more inclusive and approachable by listening directly to the diverse community of people who use it.

In the spirit of building in the open, today we’re thrilled to announce the anonymized results of that survey are now freely available. In this post, we’ll run you through what the survey covered, why and how we’re publishing this data, what the data is not (read: identifiable), how we’re using this information to improve what we do, and opportunities for further understanding and research.

You’ve been asking all year, and the wait is over… Mark your calendars, because Community Day 2026 will be held on Saturday, November 7! 🎉

Back in April during State of the Open Home 2026, we gave you a sneak peek of ESPHome’s very first official product… And after months of hard work alongside the community, the ESPHome Starter Kit is here! 🎉

Home Assistant 2026.8! 🎉

Hi, I’m Ashley, the Technical Program Manager at the Open Home Foundation. With Frenck taking a well-deserved break, Bram and I are teaming up to handle things this time around.

We have been working on a lot over the past few weeks, and I’m excited to share some of what we have done for this release!

If there’s one thread tying this release together, it’s a direction we care about: making Home Assistant something you don’t need to be technical to use. This release is another step along that path.

Enjoy the release!

- Ashley

Something big just happened. As the Open Home Foundation’s Android developer for Home Assistant, I was invited by the European Commission to consult on Android interoperability. On July 16, 2026, the Commission adopted a decision requiring Alphabet to open up eleven Android features — including always-on wake word detection, ambient sensor access, and screen automation — to all assistants, on equal terms.

The Open Home Foundation fights for privacy, choice, and sustainability. These principles are at the heart of everything we do, including how we handle website analytics. Our position is clear: we reject tools that track individuals across the web to monetize their data. Instead, we want aggregated, anonymized analytics that show how our websites are performing overall — without identifying who our visitors are, or compromising their privacy.

Sound the alarm, because Works with Home Assistant just welcomed our newest partner to the program: FireAvert! 🎉 Specialists in fire safety, FireAvert are on a mission to keep you and your home out of harm’s way. They bring the very first gas and electric appliance shutoff devices to the program, and with them, a whole lot of peace of mind.

Ever since we introduced the idea of a community-powered device database at State of the Open Home 2025, our goal has been clear: create a “Wikipedia of smart home devices” based on real-world usage. In February, we took the first step by inviting Home Assistant users to voluntarily share anonymized device data to help us build it.

The Works with Home Assistant program powers up this month as we welcome our new partner, IoTorero! 🎉 Experts in pre-flashed smart home hardware, IoTorero bring the very first ESPHome-ready smart plugs and relays to the program (and that’s not all).