Home Assistant has rolled out a sizable update for its Android companion app, giving smart home users a smoother setup process, faster voice responses, and an easier way to manage devices and services inside the app.
The latest release, Home Assistant for Android version 2026.1.6, was recently announced on the company’s social channels and focuses heavily on usability improvements. One of the biggest changes is a refreshed onboarding experience. For anyone installing Home Assistant for the first time (or setting it up again on a new phone), the updated onboarding flow is designed to make connecting your smart home and getting started feel more streamlined and less confusing. This updated onboarding experience mirrors a similar improvement that previously appeared on iOS, bringing the two platforms closer in terms of polish and consistency.
Voice control also gets a meaningful upgrade. Home Assistant says its Assist feature now supports streaming text-to-speech. In practical terms, that should reduce perceived waiting time when you issue a voice command, since responses can begin playing sooner rather than forcing you to wait for the entire audio output to be generated before anything happens. If you rely on Assist for everyday routines—turning lights on and off, adjusting thermostats, or triggering scenes—this change could make interactions feel noticeably quicker and more natural.
Another standout addition is a new entity picker, introduced as part of the 2026.1 app feature set and now present in the Android experience. Entities are at the heart of Home Assistant: they represent the individual devices, sensors, toggles, and controls you interact with. The improved entity picker brings more helpful filtering options, including the ability to filter by ID, name, and area. That’s especially useful in larger smart homes where you might have dozens (or hundreds) of entities spread across multiple rooms—making it much faster to find exactly what you need when building dashboards, automations, or troubleshooting.
Home Assistant version 2026.1.6 is available now through the Google Play Store. Although the Play Store listing doesn’t include detailed release notes, users who want the full list of changes can find a complete changelog on Home Assistant’s official GitHub page. Looking ahead, the company also notes that a broader Home Assistant 2025.2 update for the open-source smart home platform is expected to arrive in the coming days, which may bring additional improvements beyond the mobile app.
