In case you missed it, we had a pretty huge presence at this year’s GitHub Universe, their global annual developer conference. 2024 was the culmination of many years of our community growing, and there were some really big moments—our community meetup in San Francisco, awards, rising in GitHub’s rankings, and being a part of the event’s Day 2 keynote.

After a few years of being in 2nd place, we are now the #1 open source project on GitHub with over 21,000 contributors helping build Home Assistant. We also won the Wonderfully Welcoming award for being the 2nd most active project for new contributors. This is really just scratching the surface of the week we spent together in San Francisco, and I (Missy Quarry, your Community & Social Media Manager) would like to share the highlights with everyone who couldn’t make it this year.

Table of contents

• Community comes together
• We are number 1!
• Open Source - ⭐️ of the show
• Connecting with the community

TL;DR We are making great progress on our roadmap, and moving forward onto the next priorities on the roadmap. 🚂🚃🚃🚃🚃🚃🚃🚃🚃

As we had previously mentioned, the goal of the roadmap is to provide a North Star for all of our product initiatives to follow in a coherent and consistent direction. At the State of the Open Home in April this year, we introduced to our community our first roadmap. We intend to keep our community informed every half year, and this is our first update to our public roadmap.

We are happy to report that we have made good progress on the product initiatives on our roadmap so far, thanks to our core maintainers along with the help of the team at Nabu Casa, the commercial partner of the Open Home Foundation. Most of the product initiatives in the 2024 roadmap have matured according to plan, and now the team has begun to focus on the ones that we had planned for next.

- Madelena & JLo

Home Assistant 2024.11! 🎉

It is November already, and we are closing in on the end of the year, but we are not slowing down!

Before we dive into what this release has to offer, I want to take a moment to thank everyone who has contributed to the Home Assistant project. You might have heard this already, but going to share it again:

We are number one! 🥇

GitHub published its annual Octoverse report, highlighting the platform’s biggest trends and projects. It named Home Assistant 2024’s largest open-source project, with over 21,000 contributors over the year. That includes you! ❤️

Continuing the festivities, this release is a big one! The new dashboarding system we have been working on all year is now out of its experimental phase and generally available! 🥳 Exciting, everyone can now create beautiful dashboards with ease!

To top it off, this release also supports faster and lower-latency camera streams using WebRTC, supported by the Open Home Foundation. This is a huge improvement! 🎉

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

Give us a minute of your time and lend your voice to improve our community-driven, privacy-focused voice assistant, and together we’ll break big tech’s stranglehold on home voice control.

When you use Home Assistant Assist we’ll never take your data unwillingly to improve its functionality; that’s why we’re asking for your help today (more on that below).

Specifically, we’re trying to improve our wake word engine, which “wakes” the device to listen for more commands. Our open source microWakeWord engine is an incredible, lightweight bit of code but requires training with real voices to improve. Everyone’s voice is unique, and we need recordings of people of all genders, ages, and accents from around the world saying this wake word. So get the whole home involved, along with friends and family.

Help us today

We’ve found an issue in Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 that has affected a small number of customers, which appears to be the result of a faulty part incorporated in the first production run of ZBT-1 devices. We want to make sure everyone can get a replacement ZBT-1 and ensure they are covered far into the future.

Though Home Assistant SkyConnect is identical to the ZBT-1 under the hood, it is not affected. The design is not what’s at fault, but instead, a defective voltage regulator that was used in this specific production run that is causing the issue. When a ZBT-1 is inserted into certain USB-A ports, the voltage regulator can fail, fully bricking the device. We used high-quality manufacturing and quality control in this and previous production runs. We are undertaking an investigation to find out how this could happen and most importantly, to avoid a repeat of anything remotely similar in the future.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you. Below are details on our investigation, how devices are affected, and the replacement program.

• Background
• Pausing sales
• Replacement Program
• Conclusion

Boo! 👻

Please don’t be scared; it is October, Halloween is coming, and so is the next Home Assistant release: 2024.10! 🎃

The release we bring you today is a perfect mix of new UI features, advanced features, improvements, and lots of bug fixes while not being too overwhelming. There is something for everyone in this release.

Most notably, we have a brand new heading card. It allows you to add titles or subtitles to your dashboards, make them clickable, and even add cute little entities to them. The new section dashboard gets better and better with every release, which is super exciting!

We also introduce some small YAML automation syntax changes. If you are still a sucker for writing your automations in YAMLYAML is a human-readable data serialization language. It is used to store and transmit data in a structured format. In Home Assistant, YAML is used for configuration, for example in the configuration.yaml or automations.yaml files. [Learn more] (like me), I’m sure you’ll love these little tweaks that make it all feel more natural.

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

Today there has been an important announcement, I (Paulus, founder of Home Assistant) will be taking a seat on the Z-Wave Alliance Board of Directors, representing Nabu Casa. This is a significant piece of recognition for the work we have put into our support of open standards, and the importance of open source projects in keeping standards successful and thriving.

Being part of this board allows us to play a bigger role in shaping Z-Wave’s future. As a Standards Development Organization (SDO) the Alliance is shaped by its members, and they brought us in for our connection to our community and expertise in open source. We will be giving a voice to Home Assistant users, open source development, and Open Home Foundation values.

I’ve said it before, but Home Assistant would be nothing without its community. That’s why we decided this year to focus our anniversary celebration on acknowledging and thanking our amazing community. It’s fitting as 2024 was the year we added a dedicated community manager, Missy Quarry, who hosted this celebration of you in our 11th Anniversary live stream.

Missy co-hosted the stream with creator and Home Assistant community member Andrej Broz, better known as Bearded Tinker. Together they threw a barrage of questions at Frenck and myself - we didn’t see any of them ahead of time so our responses don’t get any more real than that. It was a lot of fun, and there was even a little announcement slipped in there, so please check it out.

We can’t thank our community enough for the past 11 years. You are the engine driving forward Home Assistant. You put in your spare time to test, fix, build, and share your ideas. You fund our work by subscribing to Home Assistant Cloud, which allows us to devote our full attention to you, and never have to answer to a bunch of investors. We couldn’t do it without you.

Bruno here once again to bring you a bunch of news on your favorite iOS App 😉. In this release, we are introducing some new features to complement the release of iOS 18, along with a new way to configure your Home Assistant Apple Watch app.

Home Assistant 2024.9! 🎉

Many community members based in the northern hemisphere have taken advantage of the nicer weather to take a little time off. Home Assistant releases have continued to grow for some time, and this one might not be as gargantuan in size as previous releases, but it still packs some really cool features and announcements.

This release includes bigger sections, smarter energy monitoring, and a new LLM option. We’ve added five new integrations, along with one existing integration being added to the UI. On top of all that, we’ve announced a new Works with Home Assistant partner, and the culmination of a project to ensure our project is truly open source.

We hope you’ve been able to enjoy some time in, and away, from your smart home this month as well.

Enjoy the release!